Fuzzy "begins with" search with Solr and Sunspot on multiple words

Question

I'm trying to provide a text search to find cities, based on their name and the name of the country they belong to.

For instance, I want to return Milan, Italy for a search with the terms mil ita, or also Los Angeles, United States for a search on los ang uni.

These are the current models I have (validations omitted):

class City < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :country

  searchable do
    text :name
    text :country do
      country.name
    end
  end
end

and

class Country < ActiveRecord::Base
end

This is the relevant part of my solr schema.xml file:

<fieldtype class="solr.TextField" positionIncrementGap="100" name="text">
  <analyzer type="index">
    <tokenizer class="solr.StandardTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.StandardFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <!--<filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory" words="stopwords.txt" ignoreCase="true"/>-->
    <filter class="solr.ISOLatin1AccentFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.TrimFilterFactory" />
    <filter class="solr.EdgeNGramFilterFactory"
            minGramSize="3"
            maxGramSize="30"/>
  </analyzer>
  <analyzer type="query">
    <tokenizer class="solr.StandardTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.StandardFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <!--<filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory" words="stopwords.txt" ignoreCase="true"/>-->
    <filter class="solr.ISOLatin1AccentFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.TrimFilterFactory" />
  </analyzer>
</fieldtype>

I'm performing a search in a controller with:

search = City.search do
  fulltext params[:q]
  paginate page: 1, per_page: 10
end

What happens here, is if I search for mil I will get Milan, Italy as a result, but searching for mil ita will return nothing.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance,

r.

Answer 1

Found a solution, I thought I'd share.

All you need is to build a 'custom field' with all the text that you want to enable search on, like this (in the City model):

searchable do
  text :composite_name do
    "#{name} #{country.name}"
  end
end

This works.

r.