Inspect MetaSearch columns

Question

Regarding MetaSearch, I would like to extract "human" names from the search parameters. For example, when the params[:search] has non-blank values for the following:

- title_contains

- author_name_contains

I would like to extract:

- title

- author name

The end use would be to provide additional feedback to the user such as:

Results filtered on title and author name

I would like to use functions within the MetaSearch library to achieve this instead of re-developing the param parsing. While the above examples are simple in Ruby the MetaSearch parameter language can be expressive.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you really want to get these from the MetaSearch object, you can do something like:

@search.search_attributes.except('meta_sort').select {|k, v| v.present?}

I'm not really sure that you're gaining anything over pulling this from the params directly, though. In any real-world usage, you'd probably want to change the text you display based on the predicate.

You may want to tackle this using i18n, instead:

http://rdoc.info/github/ernie/meta_search/master/file/README.rdoc#Localization