acts_as_ferret pagination

17Jan08

Ok, Ferret is great, but how to paginate?

I saw several solutions on the net and liked this one the most.

It appears that it’s quite easy to integrate acts_as_ferret with will_paginate, the officially recommended pagination plugin for Rails.

First, a patch is needed. I placed it to a new file in my special place for patches, vendor/plugins/patches/lib; it could also go in some of existing application files, e.g. bottom of environment.rb:


module ActsAsFerret
  module ClassMethods
    alias :find_all_by_contents :find_by_contents
  end
end

Then, in controller:


@users = User.paginate_by_contents(@search.query,
  :total_entries => User.total_hits(@search.query), :page => params[:page],
  :per_page => 10)

Change User to your model class here. You can also use sorting here, see Tutorial below for guidelines.

The trick is that will_paginate is friendly to model class’s methods like find_all_by_xxx; acts_as_ferret’s find_by_contents’s name is a bit wrong for it, so we make an alias, and later this method becomes our model’s method, when we put acts_as_ferret statement in the model class definition.

References:

  • Acts_As_Ferret Tutorial
  • This solution was taken from will_paginate’s author blog, thanks ocher!

Filed under: acts_as_ferret, rails, tips, will_paginate   |  5 Comments

5 Responses to “acts_as_ferret pagination”  

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  1. 1 Liam on June 28, 2008 said:

    I placed the first set of code that you posted into ‘vendor/plugins/patches/lib’ and then entered the following in the console (after restarting the console). Any clues to what’s wrong here?

    t = Post.paginate_by_contents(‘test’, :total_entries => 10, :page => 1, :per_page => 2)
    NoMethodError: undefined method `find_all_by_contents’ for #
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/base.rb:1613:in `method_missing_without_paginate’
    from /Users/liamks/Documents/programs/rails/liamkaufman/vendor/plugins/will_paginate/lib/will_paginate/finder.rb:164:in `method_missing’
    from /Users/liamks/Documents/programs/rails/liamkaufman/vendor/plugins/will_paginate/lib/will_paginate/finder.rb:82:in `send’
    from /Users/liamks/Documents/programs/rails/liamkaufman/vendor/plugins/will_paginate/lib/will_paginate/finder.rb:82:in `paginate’
    from /Users/liamks/Documents/programs/rails/liamkaufman/vendor/plugins/will_paginate/lib/will_paginate/collection.rb:87:in `create’
    from /Users/liamks/Documents/programs/rails/liamkaufman/vendor/plugins/will_paginate/lib/will_paginate/finder.rb:76:in `paginate’
    from /Users/liamks/Documents/programs/rails/liamkaufman/vendor/plugins/will_paginate/lib/will_paginate/finder.rb:177:in `method_missing’
    from (irb):1

    Reply
  2. 2 thirstydoh on July 1, 2008 said:

    Looks like the patch file is not loaded. You need to put its name into vendor/plugins/patches/init.rb file, like this:

    require ‘aaf_pagination’

    Note you don’t need to mention lib directory there, it’s searched automatically.

    Reply
  3. 3 Liam on July 4, 2008 said:

    Thanks for your reply!

    I tried your suggestion and all the errors went away, however, all my search queries turn up nothing. Every single search combo in the console returns:

    I decided to uninstall will_paginate plugin and install the mislav-will_paginate gem and use the built in pagination of ferret with the following method:

    http://www.jumbabox.com/2008/05/acts_as_ferret-tutorial/

    Unfortunately, that technique also returns nothing when I run a query… Given that the null findings occured in the new technique and the technique you suggested I was wondering if you have any ideas on how to remedy it?

    Reply
  4. 4 Justin on January 23, 2009 said:

    You might want to try to use less magic and monkey patching, and just use the two APIs together.

    def self.paginate_by_contents(term, opts)
    self.paginate(term, {:finder => “find_by_contents”, :total_entries => self.total_hits(term)}.merge(opts || {}))
    end

    Reply
  5. 5 Chris on April 24, 2009 said:

    In Rails 2.3 you have to make sure you load acts_as_ferret, will_paginate, and the patch in the right order. In order for me to get this working, I had to put require ‘acts_as_ferret’ above the initialize loop in environment.rb. If I didn’t, the patch would load before acts_as_ferret and result in an error.

    Reply

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