Birddog was birthed from our experience with Bloodhound (github.com/foca/bloodhound) Much of the code in Birddog is derived (lifted) from Bloodhound, but has been extended to include aggregates/regexes/testing and is Rails 3 compatible.
Birddog and Bloodhound provide functionality to parse “natural language” into scopes for ActiveRecord. They provide the avenue to enable “users” to choose the constraints of a scope based on the type of the scope parameters. (Kind of confusing, but super helpful for things like user defined rule based selection)
Install it gem install birddog # => OR include it in your Gemfile
Given the following model definitions
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
include Birddog
has_many :products
birddog do |search|
search.field :first_name
search.alias_field :name, :first_name
search.field :last_name
search.field :total_product_value, :type => :decimal, :aggregate => "SUM(products.value) AS total_product_value"
search.field :insensitive_last_name, :attribute => "last_name", :case_sensitive => false
search.field :substringed_last_name, :attribute => "last_name", :match_substring => true
search.field :available_product, :type => :boolean,
:attribute => "products.available",
:include => :products
search.keyword :aggregate_user do
select(arel_table[:id]).
joins("LEFT OUTER JOIN products AS products ON (products.user_id = users.id)").
group(arel_table[:id])
end
search.text_search "first_name", "last_name", "products.name", :include => :products
end
end
class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
include Birddog
belongs_to :user
birddog do |search|
search.text_search "products.name", "products.value"
search.field :name, :regex => true, :wildcard => true
search.field :value, :type => :decimal
search.field :available, :type => :boolean
search.keyword :sort do |value|
{ :order => "#{search.fields[value.to_sym][:attribute]} DESC" }
end
end
end
# The following will return all user ids with an aggregated "total_product_value" greater than 100
data_set = User.search("total_product_value:>100").search("aggregate_user")
You can now use birddog to query the models and run a single query chain to aggregate large datasets
There are many more aggregation and selection methods included, but this and the test suite should give you a good start.
Birddog (and subsequently Bloodhound) are licensed under MIT license (Read lib/birddog.rb for full license)