Question

I have no experience with thinking_sphinx (I take pride in the fact I even got it working).

I would like to sort my results based on relevance to the search and how recent they are. Maybe, 5X for relevance, 1X for time. (I’d have to play with that to get it right). Obviously if there’s no search criteria, I’d like it to sort just by time.

I know I need to add the created_at column to the search model, but not as indexes (what term do I use?)

Report controller:

def index
  @reports = Report.search params[:search]
  # unknown sorting code here
end

Report model:

  define_index do
    indexes apparatus
    indexes body
    indexes comments.body, as => :comment_body
    ????? created_at
  end

Answer 1

You would just do:

define_index do
  indexes apparatus
  indexes body 
  indexes comments.body, as => :comment_body

  has created_at
end

By using has you just denote whatever fields it needs but isn’t indexing on

For search sorting, you need to read the Sphinx docs for how you think you’d want them weighted and sorted:

http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/searching.html#sorting

http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/searching.html#fieldweights

By default, Sphinx sorts based on how relevant it thinks the results are to the given inputs.