Question

I am following Railscasts #399 to implement autocompletion in my search box using autocomplete from jquery-ui. However, I would also like to be able include which category each search suggestion belongs to and group the suggestions, similar to how Pandora can match on Song/Artist/Album.

My model looks like this:

class SearchSuggestion < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :popularity, :term, :type

  def self.terms_for(prefix)
     suggestions = where("term like ?", "#{prefix}_%")
     suggestions.order("popularity desc").limit(10).pluck(:term)
  end
end

and my controller like this:

class SearchSuggestionsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    render json: SearchSuggestion.terms_for(params[:term])
  end
end

How can I modify terms_for so that I can include :type in my json in a format that autocomplete can handle, and how would I go about rendering this?

Answer 1

I found a way to do what I wanted, so I figured I would answer my own question. I discovered the handy collect method, and wrote my function like this:

def self.terms_for(prefix)
   suggestions = where("term like ?", "#{prefix}_%").order("popularity desc").limit(10)
   suggestions.collect {|suggestion| {"value" => suggestion["term"], "type" => suggestion["suggestion_type"] }}
end