Searchable: Me Too!

I've got to echo what seems to be the community consensus: use the Searchable plugin for Grails if you need to do any sort of searching or filtering. It just works and it works damn well. I'm using it to search/filter some lists of domain objects in my app with nice paging support. I added the plugin to an existing, deployed application in less than an hour this afternoon. The documentation was straightforward and easy to understand.

The only real trick I did was using the 'component' option for searching related domain classes. Take my domain class below:

class SampleRequest {
    static searchable = true
    static hasMany = [samples: Sample]
    static mappedBy = [samples: "request"]
    static belongsTo = User

    // fields
    User investigator
    Hole hole
    Double top
    Double bottom
    String sampleType
    Integer samplesRequested = 1
    Double sampleSpacing = 0.0
    SampleGroup sampleGroup
    String notes = ""
    Date created = new Date()
    String status = STATE_NEW
    Integer priority = 1
}

By default, related domain classes such as User, Hole, and SampleGroup above are treated as references. When I was searching for something like "micropaleo" which happens to be the name of a SampleGroup object, Searchable would return the actual SampleGroup but not all of the SampleRequest objects in that group. Since I was mainly interested in the sample requests in that group, I simply changed my searchable definition to:

static searchable = {
    hole component:true
    investigator component:true
    sampleGroup component:true
}

and added static def searchable = true to my User, Hole, and SampleGroup domain classes. So now when I search for something like "micropaleo" or "olney" the sample requests in that group or by that user are returned.

The best part is, my user's think I'm some sort of programming deity because they asked for search and I added it that same day. Hopefully none of them read this blog and see how little work it was for me.

Cheers.