Search and Filter Rails Models Without Bloating Your Controller - Screencasts

By

Justin Weiss

Searching, sorting, and filtering in Rails controllers can be a pain. ElasticSearch and Solr are great, high-powered solutions, but are really big dependencies for a small app.

Luckily, Rails includes scopes, which can provide you with a lot of what you need for simple searching, filtering, and sorting. If you take advantage of scope chaining, you can build the features you want without taking on big dependencies or writing a bunch of repetitive search code yourself.

In this 14-minute screencast, you'll walk through building a sortable, filterable inventory screen inside a brand new Rails app. And in the process, you'll learn the tricks and techniques I use to quickly master new Rails concepts.

You'll get the source code for the sample app along with the videos, so you can refer to it when you add simple searching and filtering to your own Rails apps.