Thinking Sphinx Global Search All Models

Question

I'm running sphinx, thinking sphinx and have a basic ordering system with companies, users, order, notes, comments amongst others.

TS is running fine, searching in individual models and their nested resources is working brilliant.

What I wanted to do is have a global search form in my header (application.html.erb). The problem is where my form's posting to.

<%= form_tag companies_path, :method => 'get', :id => "companies_search" do %>
  <p>
    <%= text_field_tag :search, params[:search] %>
    <%= submit_tag "Search", :name => nil %>
  </p>  
<% end %>

Obviously this works for my companies and nested resources. If I put it in my header, any result will be returned on my company layout.

Is it possible to create a dynamic alternative to companies_path?

Or, should I create some special layout?

What does everyone else do here?

pat pat · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-07T01:45:13

I'd create a separate action for handling global searches - or at least, separate routing back to a reusable search action, and have that action detect whether it's a global search, company search, etc.

As for the header - do you always want it global? Because that's easy enough - just use the global/generic search action for the form constantly. If you want it done dynamically, though - defaulting to the context of the models if appropriate? - I'd probably opt for a content_for block, and add the appropriate search form in each of the relevant views.

Of course, that gets messy, so a different way could be to just customise the url via a helper that looks at params[:controller] to see what the current context is. No idea how fragile this might get, though.

Thinking Sphinx Global Search All Models

1 Answers