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ruby-on-railssphinxthinking-sphinx

Thinking sphinx ancestry searching


I need to get all of the users from groups including subgroups:

app/indices/user_index.rb

 ThinkingSphinx::Index.define :user, with: :active_record, delta: ThinkingSphinx::Deltas::SidekiqDelta do
   has groups.id
   has "CONCAT_WS('/',groups.id,groups.ancestry)", as: :group_ids, type: :integer, multi: true
end

But when i'm trying to search:

User.search_for_ids(with_all: { group_ids: [3] })

It returns all of the users from subgroups, but without users from group with id 3

  • Sphinx 2.1.7 running undex arch linux
  • Thinking sphinx v3.1.1

Solution

  • Finally found out the problem:

    has "CONCAT_WS('/',groups.id,groups.ancestry)", as: :group_ids, type: :integer, multi: true
    

    was returning only 1 id or ancestry per group, meaning if user has few root groups, e.g 3,5 the expression above will return only 1 group:

    +----+--------+-----------+
    | id | groups | group_ids |
    +----+--------+-----------+
    | 39 | 5      | 5/3       |
    | 40 | 245,3  | 245       |
    | 42 | 5      | 5/3       |
    | 43 | 234    | 234/3/5   |
    

    and the user with id 40 was was not finding. But, if you notice, everything works fine for groups column. The solution is to use group concat:

    has "CONCAT_WS('/',GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT groups.`id` SEPARATOR '/'), GROUP_CONCAT(groups.`ancestry` SEPARATOR '/') )", as: :group_ids, type: :integer, multi: true
    

    Result:

    +----+--------+-----------+
    | id | groups | group_ids |
    +----+--------+-----------+
    | 39 | 5      | 5/3       |
    | 40 | 245,3  | 245/3     |
    | 42 | 5      | 5/3       |
    | 43 | 234    | 234/3/5   |
    

    Also, it works fine with "/" separator.