Member-only story
Build a Filtered Search From Scratch for Your Rails 5 Application
When your search algorithm is good, no one will notice, but when a search algorithm is bad… it’s really bad
Adding a search to any application is always harder than it looks. The thing is, when your search algorithm is good, no one will notice, but when a search algorithm is bad… it’s really bad. I’m thinking of this particular restaurant app in Shanghai, and how it’s impossible to find a good brunch near you.
There are several ways to build search and filters in a Rails 5 application. I’m in the process of writing an article that integrates filters with named scopes, but I wanted to create an article using acts-as-taggable first. That’s because to me, this is really the most important part of the gem: how do you find completely unrelated information using a specific search criteria?
I’ll start with using my Cocktail app from the Simple Search tutorial I wrote on Medium and add tags to that. If you want to start with my boilerplate, you can find it on GitHub.
Using tags is a powerful way to connect unrelated data models in your Rails app. In this example, we will compare both the type of cocktail (do you serve it before dinner, with dinner, after, etc.) and the taste notes (is the cocktail sweet, sour, fruity?). Both of those things are related to the overall description of the cocktail, but they are independent of each other.
1. Add Tags Into Your Application
I’ll start by installing the gem and runnings its migrations.
#Gemfile
gem 'acts-as-taggable-on', '~> 6.0'#Terminal
rails acts_as_taggable_on_engine:install:migrations
rails db:migrate
2. Add Tags to Cocktails
Once the tags are in the application, I can add them to my Cocktail model. Typically, Acts As Taggable adds the tags into a generic ‘tag_list,’ but for this app I’m creating two filters — one for the general category of the cocktail (“After Dinner,”…
