Efficient Search with Rails Ransack: Filtering Model records by State

Are you looking for a powerful and flexible way to search your Rails application’s data? Look no further than Ransack. Ransack is a Ruby gem that provides a simple yet powerful interface for constructing complex search queries for ActiveRecord models.

One great feature of Ransack is its ability to limit available search options based on the attributes of your models. This can be especially useful when you want to prevent users from performing certain types of searches that may be irrelevant or slow down your application.

For example, let’s say you have an e-commerce site built on Spree, a popular Rails e-commerce framework. You want to allow users to search for orders in the “cart” or “delivery” state, but not any other state. With Ransack, you can accomplish this easily by adding a ransackable_scope method to your Spree::Order model:

class Spree::Order < ApplicationRecord
  def self.ransackable_scopes(auth_object = nil)
    if auth_object == :cart_search
      %i[state_cont_any]
    else
      super
    end
  end
end

Here, we define a ransackable_scopes method that returns an array of symbols representing the scopes that can be used in Ransack searches. In this case, we limit the available scopes to :state_cont_any when auth_object is set to :cart_search. This means that users can only search for orders with a state that contains either “cart” or “delivery”.

Then, you can use the Ransack search method in your controller to perform the search:

Spree::Order.ransack(params[:q], auth_object: :cart_search).result.count

Here, we pass the params[:q] object, which contains the search query, and the auth_object parameter set to :cart_search. This tells Ransack to only use the ransackable_scopes defined for this authorization object.

With Ransack, you can easily limit search options for your models, making your application more user-friendly and performant. Give it a try in your next Rails project!