Rails search with where and geocode near at the same time

Question

Is there a way I could search with both a where condition and a near condition at the same time, showing results for both. Basically, I want a search bar where a user could enter a name of a person, but they could also enter a location and the search would show results that match both. I tried having the where query and then a separate near query and looping through the Geocoded results and adding them to the main results, but this creates repeats and is less than desirable. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Which geocoding gem are you using? My guess is that instead of doing query.where.near you can do a query.where where you set the equivalent options that the near selector generates.

This is a different question and one theoretically orthogonal to what you asked...but is your controller making any decisions before the query is passed onto ActiveRecord? For example, if a user types in New York, NY, does your controller "guess" that it is a location? Or does it just try to do a name-matching search AND a geocode attempt, no matter what the input is? I ask this because if you do parse out the input, you could have this be an if/else situation, where if query is a location, do a geocode or else do a search by name.

I wonder whether it's sensible design to have a search box that doesn't distinguish between a person's name and a location name before hitting the database, but maybe you have a creative use-case.