Thinking Sphinx without condition - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a following model:
class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
define_index do
indexes content
indexes :name, sortable: true
has type
end
end
and special type of an article is:
class About < Article
end
and the same for Contact
I would like to have searchable articles index action without articles with type of "About" or "Contact"
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
load_and_authorize_resource
def index
#articles = Article.search(params[:search],
:with_all => {:type => nil},
:page => params[:page],
:per_page => 10)
end
end
But the #articles instance variable contains everytime also "About" & "Contact" articles.
This is very strange (seems like will_paginate messing everything up):
#articles = Article.search(
:without => {:type => %w(About Contact)}).include?(About.first) # false
#articles = Article.search(
:without => {:type => %w(About Contact)},
:page => 1,
:per_page => 1000).include?(About.first) # true
=============================================================================
Finally I did:
class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
define_index do
indexes content
indexes :name, sortable: true
has "CRC32(type)", :as => :article_type, :type => :integer
end
end
and:
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
load_and_authorize_resource
def index
#articles = Article.search(params[:search],
:without => {:article_type => ["About".to_crc32, "Contact".to_crc32]},
:page => params[:page],
:per_page => 10)
end
end
and it works. Thanks guys!

Answer 1

From the Thinking Sphinx FAQ:
Filtering on String Attributes
While you can have string columns as
attributes in Sphinx, they aren’t stored as strings. Instead, Sphinx
figures out the alphabetical order, and gives each string an integer
value to make them useful for sorting. However, this means it’s close
to impossible to filter on these attributes.
So, to get around this, there’s two options: firstly, use integer
attributes instead, if you possibly can. This works for small result
sets (for example: gender). Otherwise, you might want to consider
manually converting the string to a CRC integer value:
has "CRC32(category)", :as => :category, :type => :integer
This way, you can filter on it like so:
Article.search 'pancakes', :with => { :category => 'Ruby'.to_crc32 }
Of course, this isn’t amazingly clean, but it will work quite well.
You should also take note that CRC32 encoding can have collisions, so
it’s not the perfect solution.

Answer 2

Exclude About & Contact type from conditions like -
#articles = Article.search(params[:search],
:without => {:type => %w(About Contact)},
:page => params[:page],
:per_page => 10)
OR
I am not very sure on below but you can give it try..
define_index do
indexes content
indexes :name, sortable: true
indexes(:type), :as => :article_type
end
#articles = Article.search(params[:search],
:without => {:article_type => %w(About Contact)},
:page => params[:page],
:per_page => 10)
Also, make sure inside your database records you have type attribute got inserted properly..

Answer 3

Couldn't you use "with" instead of "with_all"? For example:
#articles = Article.search(params[:search],
:with => {:type => nil},
:page => params[:page],
:per_page => 10)