Question

I’m having trouble getting Indextank’s AutoComplete feature to work in my Rails application. I’m using searchify to host my index and the Tanker gem to create my index (https://github.com/kidpollo/tanker). I have followed the guide here (http://www.searchify.com/documentation/tutorial-autocomplete) and here (https://github.com/flaptor/indextank-jquery/) to get it working but I get no results back. I have enabled the public API in the searchify dashboard.

I think the problem is to do with the way the Tanker gem indexes the data (It can index multiple models in one index). The same issue was reported here – https://github.com/kidpollo/tanker/issues/25 – but i’m confused with the resolution that was given. I’m not sure what is meant by :indexes => :text in this instance. Can anyone shed a bit more light on what I need to do?

This is my model where I index data. No other model indexes data yet

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Tanker

  # Relationships
  belongs_to :user
  has_many :comments

  tankit index do
    indexes :title
    indexes :description
    indexes :post_comments do
      comments.map {|comment| comment.description }
    end
  end

  # define the callbacks to update or delete the index upon saving and deleting records
  after_save :update_tank_indexes
  after_destroy :delete_tank_indexes
end

This is the code I’ve used to test autocomplete. I have also tried using the example from https://github.com/flaptor/indextank-jquery/

<script src='https://raw.github.com/flaptor/indextank-jquery/master/jquery.indextank.ize.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<script src='https://raw.github.com/flaptor/indextank-jquery/master/jquery.indextank.autocomplete.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

<script type='text/javascript'> 
  var publicApiUrl = "myPublicURL";
  var indexName = "myIndexName";
</script> 

<script type='text/javascript'>
  $(document).ready(function(){
      // let the form be 'indextank-aware'
      $("#myform").indextank_Ize(publicApiUrl, indexName);
      // let the query box have autocomplete
      $("#query").indextank_Autocomplete();
  });
</script>

<%= form_tag 'posts/search', :method => :get, :id => 'myForm' do %>
  <%= text_field_tag :query, "", :id => 'query' %>
  <button type="submit">Search</button>
<% end %>

Answer 1

Hey Chris here from Searchify. I’m too familiar with the Tanker gem yet. But Searchify/IndexTank by default searches in the document field called ‘text’, including for autocomplete suggestions. So try indexing your data (title, description, or post_comments, from your code snippet) in the ‘text’ field. If you still have problems, contact me via the website or our support email and I can look at your index to see how you (and tanker) are indexing things.