Sunspot Autocomplete

Sunspot Autocomplete is a Rails plugin that lets you use Solr and Sunspot for handy autocompletion of your html text inputs.

Features:

• Autocomplete: Typing “clo” will yield results that start with “clo”, like “cloudy with a chance of meatballs”.

• Autosuggest: Typing “clo” will yield results that contain (or start with) “clo”, like “cloudy with a chance of meatballs” and “Jumping like Clowns”.

• Both features are case insenitive.

• A CSS based view. You can override some style rules to force your look and feel.

Prerequisites

You should have solr, sunspot and sunspot_rails ON and running.

outoftime.github.com/sunspot

Installation

Download the plugin and place it under vendor/plugins.

Run the following rake task to copy the plugin’s assets to your public directory. This will copy jquery.js and solr-autocompleter to your public/javascripts.

rake sunspot_autocomplete:copy_assets

Usage

In your solr schema.xml, add the following field types inside the <types> tag:

<fieldType name="autocomplete" class="solr.TextField" positionIncrementGap="100">
  <analyzer type="index">
    <tokenizer class="solr.KeywordTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.EdgeNGramFilterFactory" minGramSize="1" maxGramSize="25" />
  </analyzer>
  <analyzer type="query">
    <tokenizer class="solr.KeywordTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
  </analyzer>
</fieldType>
<fieldType name="autosuggest" class="solr.TextField" positionIncrementGap="100">
  <analyzer type="index">
    <tokenizer class="solr.LetterTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.EdgeNGramFilterFactory" minGramSize="1" maxGramSize="25" />
  </analyzer>
  <analyzer type="query">
    <tokenizer class="solr.LetterTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
  </analyzer>
</fieldType>

Also in your solr schema.xml, add the following fields inside thw <fields> tag.

<dynamicField name="*_ac" type="autocomplete" indexed="true"  stored="true"/>
<dynamicField name="*_as" type="autosuggest" indexed="true"  stored="true"/>

To be able to autocomplete/autosuggest a model’s attribute, call ‘autocomplete’/‘autosuggest’ on it in its ‘searchable’ block. the field_name used (post_title and post_author in the following example) must be unique across all your autocomplete fields of the application.

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  searchable do
    autocomplete :post_title, :using => :title
    autosuggest :post_author, :using => :author
  end
end

In your view, Add the following script tags (in the given order) to be able to use the view helpers.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/solr-autocomplete/ajax-solr/core/Core.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/solr-autocomplete/ajax-solr/core/AbstractManager.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/solr-autocomplete/ajax-solr/managers/Manager.jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/solr-autocomplete/ajax-solr/core/Parameter.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/solr-autocomplete/ajax-solr/core/ParameterStore.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/solr-autocomplete/jquery-autocomplete/jquery.autocomplete.js"></script>

Also, add the following stylesheet to use the basic style included. Alternatively, you can override those style rules to force your design’s look and feel.

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/javascripts/solr-autocomplete/jquery-autocomplete/jquery.autocomplete.css" />

In your view, to create a text field with autocomplete:

<%=autocomplete_text_field "post", "title", "http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr/", "post_title"%>

And to create a text field with autosuggest:

<%=autosuggest_text_field "post", "author", "http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr/", "post_author"%>

You can view documentation for more advanced features of the helpers.