How to add a feature to spotlight a column search on ActiveScaffold

ActiveScaffold is really nice to build something with Ruby on Rails. that saves my time a lot. though it may requires extra internal knowledges to do something that it doesn't provide. even generally.

So this is just a tips to add a column-based search feature to the ActiveScaffold. you can just patch it out to lib/active_scaffold/actions/search.rb and/or live_search.rb, or add it to your controller where you want to enable this feature.

def do_search
  @query = params[:search].to_s.strip rescue ''

  unless @query.empty?
    tmpq = @query.split(' ')
    columns_query = {}
    tmpq.delete_if do |x|
      retval = false
      if x =~ /\A(.*):(.*)\Z/ then
        p = $1
        v = $2
        if !p.nil? && !p.empty? && !v.nil? && !v.empty? &&
       active_scaffold_config.columns.include?(p) then
          columns_query[p] = v
          retval = true
        end
      end
      retval
    end
   columns = active_scaffold_config.live_search.columns
   like_pattern = active_scaffold_config.live_search.full_text_search? ? '%?%' : '?%'
   search_conditions = self.class.create_conditions_for_columns(tmpq, columns, like_pattern)
    self.active_scaffold_conditions = merge_conditions(self.active_scaffold_conditions, search_conditions)
    columns_query.each do |p,v|
      active_scaffold_config.columns.each do |column|
        next if column.column.nil?
        if column.column.name == p then
          sql = column.column.text? ? "LOWER(#{column.search_sql}) LIKE ?" : "#{column.search_sql} = ?"
          token = column.column.text? ? like_pattern.sub('?', v.downcase) : column.column.type_cast(v)
          self.active_scaffold_conditions = merge_conditions(self.active_scaffold_conditions, [sql, token])
          break
        end
      end
    end
    @filtered = !search_conditions.blank?

   includes_for_search_columns = columns.collect{ |column| column.includes}.flatten.uniq.compact
    self.active_scaffold_joins.concat includes_for_search_columns

   active_scaffold_config.list.user.page = nil
  end
end