Ultrasphinx cheatsheet: indexing fields you need!

The Sphinx/Ultrasphinx combination is great for searching. Very fast and much less load on your database than other options. It also takes a lot less memory and is more reliable.

But, the documentation is maddening. Here is what I have learned about implementing it.

To index a field on a model:

is_indexed :fields => [{:field => :field_name, :sortable => true}]

The sortable lets you sort on it later in searches. The thing to remember is that sphinx knows nothing except what you explicitly tell it. So it won't know about fields you don't mention, or what you might want to do with those fields. Don't include the :sortable flag and you can't sort on it.

To that end, we have a field called 'available' that we set/unset if an item in the catalogue shouldn't be displayed online. Now, we never really want to search on that, but, we do want to include it in searches as a filter. So, the first line of our model is really this:

is_indexed  :fields => [{:field => :title, :facet => true, :sortable => true}, :available]

That means we can do this:

@films = Ultrasphinx::Search.new(:query => "title:Foo", :class_names => ['Film'], :filters => {"available" => 1}).run

And we'll just get a list of available films named Red (or with Red in the title).