Question

In a typical Rails scenario where I only want the first and only one record returned, I would say:

SomeModel.find(:first, :conditions => {:some_field => 'some_value'})

How would I ask this using thinking_sphinx? I’m supposing or hoping it would be something like:

SomeModel.search :conditions => {:limit => 'first', :some_field => some_value} 

However, I’m fairly certain this won’t work as it is just a wishful guess. Any clues?

Answer 1

Hm, I’m afraid it’s wrong way to compare searching by exact matching of looked up phrase (the first example) with full-text searching provided by Sphinx (the second one). While using the first query you are able to retrieve the only one first record with equal value to the searched one. And if you use Sphinx you pass a ranking function that defines what matching best suits for you (eg. if you give more keywords, then you can state whether you want to match all the keywords in each document, or only one keyword per document). If you want to read more about it, you can follow a link: http://sphinxsearch.com/blog/2010/08/17/how-sphinx-relevance-ranking-works/.

However it’s possible to get the first matching value using thinking-sphinx, example:

Article.search('sphinx relevance', :match_mode => :all).first