Confounding URL typists since 2007.
A couple of nights ago, I pushed Ransack to GitHub. What’s Ransack? Well, previously I was calling it MetaSearch 2.0, and it’s a complete rewrite, not unlike the MetaWhere 2.0 development in the rewrite branch (a name change is also forthcoming for MW 2.0, if you’re curious). Why change names? A few reasons:
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This has been a long time coming. Both MetaSearch and MetaWhere entered development as Rails 3-only gems early last year. Developing them was a great learning process, as I got to dive deeper into the innards of Rails and ARel than I ever expected, and track ARel through a complete rewrite and maintainer change, as well. The only updates you’ll notice from the last released gems are the docs (MetaSearch/MetaWhere), which should now be up to date (site docs to follow soon). It feels good to finally hit 1.0!
Things have largely quieted down on the MetaSearch/MetaWhere front. The currently released gems are working well for me on a few large-ish projects, and I haven’t seen any serious bug reports in quite some time. I’m happy with the existing APIs, and while I’d certainly like to do a bit of refactoring, that’s nothing that should result in a breaking change. All this being said, I’m considering the latest releases of MW/MS as release candidates, and will be pushing out 1.0.0 of both relatively soon, barring any serious issues. Please get your bug reports in now!
Well, Rails 3.0.3 is out, and it includes all of that ARel 2.x goodness I was rambling about a few weeks ago. Anyway, I just wanted to make a quick post here because I haven’t gotten around to updating docs with details on how to use all the new toys.
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We’re getting dangerously close to 1.0 here. (Update:: not that dangerously close. Grab 0.9.7.12 if you run into compatability issues with MetaWhere.) Squashed a silly bug or two, and added support for two features often requested by Searchlogic switchers, searching against multiple columns with _or_, and polymorphic belongs_to association searches. I’ve also switched to using left outer joins for searches now. This has its pros and cons. SQL geekery past the break.
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I was talking to someone a few weeks back, and he was jumping through a bunch of hoops to create fields in his form that allowed him to set associated objects. “You know about the collection_singular_ids methods, right?” I asked. “No, please explain,” he said. So I did. I wanted to write a quick post here, as well, in case it might help someone else.
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A recurring question I have been seeing regarding MetaSearch has been the need to modify or access the relation generated by the search. That’s precisely why MetaSearch::Builder#relation exists, so I thought I’d make a quick post detailing its usage.
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So, the Rails team released Rails 3.0 yesterday, on my birthday. I am claiming it as my birthday present. Anyway, I ran a quick test on MetaWhere and MetaSearch and everything is still passing, so we should be good to go! Let me know if it’s not the case.
Earlier this month, I released new gems of MetaSearch and MetaWhere. These gems were important personal milestones for me, because with the release of Rails 3 beta 4 and Arel 0.4.0, I was finally able to make a gem release of the work I’d been putting in on GitHub the past few months. I gave a few summary release notes, and then all fell silent on this blog. Part of this is because I’ve been busy at the office, working on a new iPhone app for a client of ours. Starting tonight, and in preparation for Rails 3 final, I’m going to cover some of the features in more detail. First up: scoping searches.
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With the release of Rails 3.0.0.beta4 and Arel 0.4.0, all of the pieces have come together in gem form to allow a new gem release of both MetaSearch and MetaWhere.
I’m really excited about these releases, as they’ve been a long time coming. The last MetaSearch gem release was way back in March, while the last MetaWhere gem was released in April — this felt like an eternity in the fast-moving edge Rails world. :) I hope you enjoy the new release, and thanks in advance for submitting any bugs you find!
Now, on to what’s new since the last gem releases…
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