Hario

Hario provides ActiveRecord filtering for Rails APIs.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hario'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install hario

Add extend Hario::Filterable to your AR model to add the search method, for instance (we'll use these classes as examples throughout):

def Brand < ActiveRecord::Base
  extend Hario::Filterable

  has_many :products
end

def Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :brand
  belongs_to :category, class_name: "ProductCategory"
end

def ProductCategory < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :products
end

Then in your BrandsController you can use the search method in your index action:

class BrandsController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :json

  def index
    @brands = Brand.search(params[:filters], params[:pluck])
    # or to only use the filterable functionality
    # @brands = Brand.search(params[:filters])

    respond_with(@brands)
  end
end

The format of params[:filters]'s keys is a dot-seperated chain of association(s) -> attribute -> operator, for instance if you wanted to return brands that have products of type "Shoe" you could add the filter:

{ 'products.category.name.equals' => 'Shoe' }

Which would result in the SQL query something like:

SELECT "brands".* FROM "brands"
INNER JOIN "products" ON "products"."brand_id" = "brands"."id"
INNER JOIN "product_categories" ON "product_categories"."id" = "products"."category_id"
WHERE "product_categories"."name" = 'Shoe'

The available operators are:

• lt (less than)
• gt (greater than)
• lte (less than or equal)
• gte (greater than or equal)
• like (sql like)
• equals

Oftentimes you might only need a particular attribute, or a few attributes, from the resource, in which case getting the whole of the resources would be inefficient.

This is where pluck comes in handy, it allows you to specify which attributes you're interested in in the request, reducing the amount of data that has to be retrieved from the database, and more importantly, sent over the wire:

@brands = Brand.search(nil, ["name"])
# will return an array of hashes containing only the primary key and the name attribute for each brand.

Like filters, you can also pluck associated columns from other models using the dot notation, e.g.:

# assuming Country belongs_to :continent
@countries = Country.search(nil, ["name", "continent.name"])

To run tests:

rake test

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/meritec/hario/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request