Paginating Sphinx

In the last post, you'll remember that I mentioned the fact that Thinking_Sphinx automatically works with will_paginate. So this time, we're going to explore how to get pagination working with our spiffy new Sphinx searching.

The first thing we'll need to do is to get will_paginate. Will_paginate has been around for a while, but has recently (relatively speaking) been moved to GitHub. Brilliant move IMHO. However, it's name also changed to mislav-will_paginate. If you don't already have the old will_paginate gem installed, that's not relevant to you. If you do, you'll want to remove the old will_paginate before installing this one (unless, of course, removing it will dork up your other projects, in which case you're on your own. Sorry).

Let's head over to the (very nicely done) will_paginate installation instructions page. You'll notice there are several options for installing it. I'm going to use "Installing the Gem manually". You go with whatever floats your boat.

So I open my cmd window and type:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

because I don't have github in my gem sources. I shouldn't ever have to do this for this machine again. And good thing, because that was just brutal...

Anyway, now I type:

gem install mislav-will_paginate

Now the gem is installed. Simple goodness...

Open the project\config\environment.rb file and add the following line AFTER the end of the initializer block (if you put it inside the block, it won't work!)

require "will_paginate"

I'm pretty sure at this point, we need to restart whatever rails server we're using (I'm using WEbrick for testing). If not, just call me stupid and move on!

Now we're all set up to use pagination. This should be pretty simple (even for me)...

The pagination stuff will be added in my views/home/index.html.erb. Just put the following line wherever you want the pagination links to show up (I'm putting mine at the bottom, so there):

<%=will_paginate @entities%>

Now, if we reload the page (and we have multiple pages of data in the result), we'll see the pagination links. If you don't see any, you probably don't have enough data. I'd recommend watching the RailsCast I mentioned in my first post to get some data in your tables. Or you can be masochistic and put it in by hand. Go ahead, we'll wait...

Ok, so now we see the pagination links, right? Just click on one of those links and...WTH???? I keep getting the same data back regardless of which page link I select! Well, that's because I haven't had my coffee today and forgot an important little change. We've got to tell the controller to give us the next page, duh. So in the controllers/home_controller.rb, in the index method, I'm going to make the search command look like this:

@entities = Entity.search params[:search],
  :page => params[:page]

Now if we click on the pagination links, they should work.

The one thing I'm not liking on this is that it's showing me 20 entities per page. I only want to see 10. So one more addition to the controllers/home_controller.rb:

@entities = Entity.search params[:search],
  :page => params[:page],
  :per_page => 10

Time for a celebratory beer...

See ya next post!

Chris