Douglas F Shearer

Jim

Very promising plugin.

Are you able to index cross-models?

For example, if my "Post" model belonged to a "Category" model, could I index on the category_name field?

Jim

I just realized that I can do what I was asking about via an instance method.

So in the above example, the method would be:

******************
Class Post < ActiveRecord::Base

acts_as_indexed :fields => [:name, :post_category_name]

belongs_to :category

def post_category_name
category.name
end

end
******************

Very cool.

Next question. Is there a way to reset the index other than deleting the "index" folder?

Douglas F Shearer

Hi Jim.

Glad you figured out your own query, having instance methods makes a lot of things easy.

ATM there is no way to reset the index other than to delete it. Obviously filesystem access is not always available, so the next version will have a method to do this from within an application (If you look carefully in the source, there has been a stub for the method since the first version, just haven't got round to doing it).

Jim

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for the response. I have some more feedback after playing with the plugin some more this morning. If you'd rather chat through email versus blogs comments, let me know.

Feedback #1:
NOT search terms are modified when find_with_index is called. If I want to make two consecutive find_with_index calls on two different models, the second call is missing the NOT term.

Example of what I was trying to do below. The params SHOULD be the same in both cases.

**********************
#params[:q] => "cooking -japanese"
l = Lesson.find_with_index params[:q]

#params[:q] => "cooking "
s = Suggestion.find_with_index params[:q]
**********************

Feedback #2:
If my search has two terms and one of the terms is junk data, all of the results with the first term are returned. I would think nothing would be returned in this case.

For example, if I searched for 'dog asdfasdfas' (not quoted) all records with dog would be returned even though 'asdfasdfas' does not exist in the database.

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions. [jim at praexis dot com]

Douglas F Shearer

Hi again Jim.

I'll drop you an email, but as a brief response..

#1 Modified query param - That's a bug, will fix that just now.

#2 Default action for a space character is AND rather than OR. I can see what you mean about having it return 'dog' if 'asdfasdfas' doesn't exist at all, but most people would consider that to be unexpected behavior.

Raul Galindo

Hi Jim
I cant reach the address the plugin is in
is this because the server is down or am i doing something wrong?
i wait for ur reply
Best regards.

Douglas F Shearer

Hi Raul.

The svn server is working fine for me. No reason it should be down as it's hosted on the same machine as this site.

The plugin install command above should work in most cases, but if for some reason your permissions are wrong you may need to run it as..

ruby script/plugin

rather than

./script/plugin

Hope this helps.

cavatina

hi

svn server is not working

Douglas F Shearer

Working fine for me.

The svn address above WILL NOT work in a browser.

I've realised this is a problem for windows users without svn, so I may move to Apache Web-DAV or provide an archived download.

Jim

Hi Douglas,

I updated to your latest code yesterday. Nice improvements on the quoted searches and the relevance rankings. Nice work!

With that being said, I'm seeing a couple of issues when running tests.

Error #1: Errno::EDOM: Numerical argument out of domain - log
- Deleting the indexes and rerunning th e tests seems to fix the issue, but it has come back a few times.

Error #2: A file name "size" does not exist the first time I run the test with my existing indexes. Deleting the indexes and rerunning also fixes this error, but it seems odd that would have to do this.

Lastly, is physically deleting the index folders still the best way to reset the indexes?

Thanks again.

Josh Owens

Douglas,

I can't connect to: ./script/plugin install svn://svn.douglasfshearer.com/rails/plugins/acts_as_indexed

Will the plugin be available sometime soon?

Douglas F Shearer

Back up now.

Thanks for the heads up.

Mark

This sounds great, but I haven't been able to get it to download via RadRails. Every other plugin I've tried works well. Any ideas?

Mark

I figured out how to get it to download. You have to include the subversions bin files in the ruby path that RadRails is looking for.

paginator

Is it possible to combine this plugin with the paginating_find plugin to handle pagin?

I tried this, but it didn't work.

Post.find_with_index('my search query', :page => { :start => 1, :current => @page_number,:size => 1 })

This didn't work either

Post.find_with_index('my search query', find_options = {:page => { :start => 1, :current => @page_number,:size => 1 }})

sara

Hi,
ruby script/plugin install svn://svn.douglasfshearer.com/rails/plugins/acts_as_indexed

returns this message

svn: Can't connect to host 'svn.douglasfshearer.com': Connection refused

Is the svn down, or have i some local issue ?

Thanks.

Sara

Douglas F Shearer

Hi Sara.

SVN is down for the moment due to a server move. it should be back up tomorrow.

Status here: http://douglasfsh...

Douglas F Shearer

I have now added a downloadable version of the plugin above until SVN is restored.

sara

Thanks :) .

Andrew

When using :include with find_with_index, there is an ambiguous column error. This change seems to fix:

acts_as_indexed/lib/acts_as_indexed.rb, line 148:

<code> records = find(:all, :conditions => [ "#{class_name.tableize}.id IN (?)", part_query])</code>

Douglas F Shearer

Thanks for the heads up on that Andrew. Now fixed along with another ActiveRecord related error.

John Honovich

How does this plugin compare to act as sphinx?

I assume the lack of dependencies makes it easier to setup.

What are the relative shortcomings of acts_as_indexed versus using sphinx?

Thanks,

John

Douglas F Shearer

Hi John.

Shortcomings of acts_as_indexed are:
- Doesn't play nice with multiple physical servers.

And that's about it, other than maybe getting noticeably slow for searches with > 100, 000 records.

Sphinx, Ferret, Solr etc are all great in large environments, but they're a pain to setup and total overkill for most applications.

Vaqas

Can I use 'boost' or something else to boost results from certain field index?

Douglas F Shearer

Hi Vaqas.

At the moment there is no way to weight a field in the way you are talking about. This is something I have on the feature list for the future.

Vaqas

What about wild cards?
~ * ?

Douglas F Shearer

Again, not a supported feature at the moment.

James

Hi.

Great plugin. Unfortunately, I need to search on a string of keywords logically connected by OR.

Before I dig into the code, any chance of supporting OR anytime soon?

----
The following query operators are supported:

* AND – This is the default option. ‘cat dog’ will find records matching ‘cat’ AND ‘dog’.
* NOT – ‘cat -dog’ will find records matching ‘cat’ AND NOT ‘dog’
* INCLUDE – ‘cat +me’ will find records matching ‘cat’ and ‘me’, even if ‘me’ is smaller than the min_word_size.
* ”” – Quoted terms are matched as phrases. ’”cat dog”’ will find records matching the whole phrase. Quoted terms can be preceded by the NOT operator. ‘cat -“big dog”’ etc.
---

Sabrina

Hi, great plugin but I have a problem...I got a strange error

"Errno::ERANGE (Numerical result out of range - log):"

only in production mode.

I guess that the indexes get corrupted because I have this app where many users upload their restaurant infornmations and it could happen that two users submit at the same time.

Is there a way to not index the content when updating but to index periodically?

thanks

Sabrina

I've found where is the error.

acts_as_indexed/lib/search_atom.rb:93:in `log'

hope it's useful.

Douglas F Shearer

@Sabrina

I shall look into these bugs tomorrow.

Thanks for flagging them up!

Russ Jones

Any chance this works with single table inheritance (STI)?

Douglas F Shearer

Yes, it should work for STI, as long as it is called from the child classes.

Interesting question.

Mark Hurlburt

Is there any chance that you'll support partial word searches? The plugin is so easy to setup that its a shame that it doesn't seem to be that viable for searching on things like names where users are likely to not know the complete spelling and would like to limit results to entries that start with or contain a string fragment.

Douglas F Shearer

Hey Mark.

It wouldn't take much work, I don't think. Currently I'm only fixing critical bugs, but I plan to do a rewrite with new features in a few months.

Robb Shecter

I just installed and tested it for the first time. Awesome job! I'd love to help contribute -- once it's up and running, I may look into partial word matches, etc.

Thanks again,
Robb