advanced search for a model (including keywords)

Hello,

I am new in rails and I am working in an application which requires advanced search. I have a model called Item which has various attributes like "weight", "price", "category", "age"...and then it has some "keywords", describing the Item.

I would like to implement an advanced search where the users can search Items using the attributes that they want.

After googling some time, I found that:

- acts_as_taggable could be useful for the "keywords" attribute. - acts_as_ferret could be useful for searching the tags (I would need to search for multiple tags in the same query, include some fuzzy search...) - Searchlogic would be very useful to implement the search with all the attributes, but I am not sure if it can cope with the acts_as_taggable plugin, or if I should implement the keywords just using a String attribute, or how to do it.

Well, I know I have a lot of work to do, but I would really appreciate if someone could give me some hints in order to point the direction in which I should work. Which is the best way (or simplest) in your opinion to implement this search?

The application will have to deal with "many" records (lets say 100.000), so I would also appreciate receiving some comments regarding speed...however it doesn't have to be the faster app in the world, in this moment I prefer an easier development and I'll improve the app in the future if needed.

Thanks a lot for your help.

It's really basic search you're looking for. 100,000 records is not that many, use acts_as_ferret with a local index and you'll be fine for quite a while.

I personally had many issues trying to use Ferret and would recommend Sphinx with thinking sphinx plugin.

And, besides using ferret or sphinx, should I also use acts_as_taggable in order to manage the keywords for each item?

Searchlogic is very plugin for search and i hoped it would help me better in pagination but pagination is not at all working.

Any pupil facing such type of errors. Thanks in advance