Scoped Search – A Rails plugin
Scoped Search is a free, open source, Rails plug-in. Designed to makes writing a search driven Rails application easy. It combines free text search with powerful scoping syntax, and an AJAX auto-completer. It enables simple search terms as well as powerful syntax including negation logical operations, human readable date and more.
With scoped search applications data can be accessed via single search box. The user search terms are converted into an SQL query using Rails ActiveRecord named scope. Searching is performed using a query string, which should be passed to the named_scope search_for. Based on a definition in what fields to look, it will build query conditions and return those as a named scope. Scoped search is great if you want to offer a simple search box to your users and build a query based on the search string they enter.
The built-in syntax auto-completer will help the user learn the powerful search syntax. The auto-completer can also suggest values from the database.
