Rewrite SQL query with tire

Question

I'm trying to rewrite a query with tire.

This is the model that I have:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :bookmarks, :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :followed_venues, :through => :bookmarks, :source => :bookmarkable, :source_type => 'Venue'
end

A user can follow venues. And I need to search for venues that are followed by a certain users.

So far I've been doing it with ActiveRecord:

@user.followed_venues.where(["venues.title LIKE ?", "%"+params[:q]+"%"])

This is obviously not ideal, so I added elasticsearch to my app with tire.

How would I search for venues with tire, filtering by the user that is following them?

Answer 1

I'm going to post an answer to my own question.

So it's quite easy to just search venues. Standard Venue.tire.search {...} The problem is how to filter by user that follows venues. Instead of using the Venue model for searching, I decided to index bookmarks.

This is my bookmark model

class Bookmark < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :bookmarkable, :polymorphic => true

  def to_indexed_json
    {
      :title => bookmarkable.display_name,
      :user_id => user_id
    }.to_json
  end
end

After this I have the user_id and the venue name in the index. Now search becomes as simple as this:

Bookmark.tire.search :load => {:include => 'bookmarkable'}, :page => page, :per_page => per_page do
  query do
    fuzzy :title => { :value => query.downcase, :min_similarity => 0.6, :prefix_length => 2}
  end
  filter :terms, {:bookmarkable_type => ["Venue"], :user_id => [user.id]}
end

Now this is not a complete solution. And I hope i'm even using filter :terms correctly. The result that I get back now is an array of bookmarks actually. But it's easy to load the actual venues for them, and maybe wrap it in a WillPaginate collection for better pagination on the frontend.

Any problems with this solution? How would it compare to what phoet suggested with putting user ids to the venue index?

Answer 2

i would create a document for each venue and then add a field with an array of all the user-ids that are following.

are you really sure, that this is a proper task for elasticsearch?

i guess it would be way easier to just search the index for the name of the venue and then look up the data you need in your relational database.