element/search

This is a simple hit based search engine for Eloquent models. It can take a string and will search the given set of models for each word in that string. It prioritizes models based on the number of times each word in the search string is found in the searchable fields in the model, with more emphasis on longer words, and less on shorter.

Installation

Element Search is available on composer. To install, simply run:

composer require element/search

Use

Making your models searchable is easy. The models simply need to implement the php Element\Search\SearchableContract interface. Then, add the getSearchable() method to the model. This method should return an array of the names of the Model's fields that the search engine can search. These fields should hold string/text data only.

For Example:

<?php

namespace App;

use Element\Search\SearchableContract;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class BlogPost extends Model implements SearchableContract {
    protected $fillable = [ 'date-created', 'date-published', 'title', 'body',
                            'author', 'image', 'viewcount' ];

    public static function getSearchable(){
        return [ 'title', 'body', 'author' ];
    }

    public static function search( $string ){
        return Search::search( new self, $string );
    }
}

In the model above, we can see from the getSearchable() function that the Search Engine will search the 'title', 'body', and 'author' fields.

The second function is optional, but it allows you to call the search function statically from the model, rather than the search facade.

ie:

App\BlogPost::search('search string');

The Search Facade

The Element Search plugin adds a Search facade to the Laravel app. This allows you to call a search on any model from anywhere using the following function:

Search::search( new App\ModelName, 'search string');

Where App\ModelName is a new instance of the model you wish to search, and 'search string' is any string you wish to search for. Additionally, you don't have to worry about removing punctuation or capital letters from your search string, the function does it automatically.

The search function, whether in the model, or called from the facade, returns the models in the form of a \Laravel\Database\Eloquent\Collection collection. This allows you to perform all the usual functions you would be able to perform on a database query.