Question

I’m trying to create a ‘search box’ that matches users by name.

The difficulty is that a user has both a firstname and a surname. Each of those can have spaces in them (eg “Jon / Bon Jovi”, or “Neil Patrick / Harris”), and I’m wondering about the most efficient way to ensure the search is carried out on a concatenation of both the firstname and surname fields.

The list of users is quite large, so performance is a concern. I could just throw a “fullname” def in the user model, but I suspect this isn’t the wisest move performance wise. My knowledge of multi-column rails indexes is weak, but I suspect there’s a way of doing it via an index with a ” ” in it?

Just to clarify, I don’t need fuzzy matching – exact match only is fine…I just need it to be run on a concatenation of two fields.

Cheers…

Answer 1

You could create a new field in your database called full_name with a regular index, then use a callback to populate this whenever the record is saved/updated:

before_save :populate_full_name

protected

def populate_full_name
  self.full_name = "#{first_name} #{last_name}"
end