Rails searchlogic and confusing column names

Searchlogic is a great Rails gem from Ben Johnson for adding model search capabilities to your Rails app with a minimum of effort.

You can build complex queries very easily such as Company.name_like_or_address_like.

But if you have column names that contain the Model name you can run into problems.

For examples, let's say my Company model has columns 'company_name' and 'company_address', then my query becomes:

Company.company_name_like_or_company_address_like

It gets worse is my Person model has_one :company and I want to search companies through that model - now my query becomes

Person.company_company_name_like_or_company_company_address_like()

Not only is that ugly as sin, it may cause searchlogic to barf when you use it in a search form.

My experience is that it can handle ugly queries like this when run in script/console but for some reason they may fail in the context of a real Rails app.

So what can you do about it?

The best solution is to change the names of your columns to remove the model names, but that is not always possible, especially in legacy databases.

Failing that, you can create a named scope in your model that performs the same query but uses a shorter, more sensible name. Searchlogic will use your named scopes quite happily.

In my example I would create a named scope in the Company model like this:

named_scope :company_name_address_like, lambda { |name|
  { :conditions => ['company_name like ? or company_address like ?', "%#{name}%", "%#{name}%"] }
}

I can then call it as Company.company_name_address_like().

Don't be tempted to include 'or','and', etc. in your custom named scope names. Searchlogic appears to try and split up the scope into components based on these 'operator' words.