Searching String Fields Using Sunspot and Rails

Question

My team is attempting to implement Solr and Sunspot-Rails as a search provider for our application. Our story requires that certain string fields be searched in addition to the text fields. I have seen some people aggregate these fields into a consolidated indexing field (with a type of Text) with ActiveRecord callbacks. Is this my only hope or is there a wildcard argument that I am missing?

Answer 1

you can define your fields that will be indexed like this

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  searchable do
    text :title, :body
    text :comments do
      comments.map { |comment| comment.body }
    end
    string  :sort_title do
      title.downcase.gsub(/^(an?|the)/, '')
    end
  end 
end

then you search them you can specify the fields you want to search like this

Post.search do
  fulltext 'pizza' do
    fields(:body, :title)
  end
end

if you didn't specify fields it'll apply the search to all the text fields indexed

Post.search do
  fulltext 'best pizza'
end