Ferret

Search Improvements

We’d like to be able to sort searches. This is pretty simple, since we can actually just pass sort strings as the :sort parameter to the Index#search_each method. We’ll also give the option to specify the :limit and :offset parameters so that the user can page through search results. Here is the search code:

158 if options.query
159   index = Ferret::I.new(:path => options.path,
160                         :default_field => :content)
161   total = index.search_each(options.query,
162                             :limit => options.limit,
163                             :offset => options.offset,
164                             :sort => options.sort) do |id, score|
165     doc = index[id]
166     puts "%1.5f => %s" % [score, doc[:path]] 
167     options.fields.each do |field|           
168       puts "\t#{field} => #{doc[field]}" if doc[field]
169     end
170   end
171   start = options.offset
172   finish = [options.offset + options.limit, total].min
173   puts "** #{start}-#{finish} of #{total} documents found **"
174 end

We use an Index object here instead of a Searcher combined with an IndexReader and QueryParser simply because it is so much easier and does everything we need without a loss in performance. For each hit, we print the score and the :path field (166). We also allow the optional printing of other fields from the hits (167).