Q: col custom search + formatting

I’ve found this brilliant gem a few days ago.

I have a cell with a JSON serialized array. I need to list these items in a DataTable cell and I also need to search through them. As easy as it is to implement each of these requirements, I have spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how to achieve both.

• For the display part I did col :participants, partial: 'participants/table_item', partial_as: 'event' and put

  <ul>
    <% JSON::parse(event.participants).each do |p| %>
      <li><%= p %></li>
    <% end %>
  </ul>
  

  in the partial.
• For the search part I’ve set up full text search in PostgreSQL so that Event.search_participants() does the searching and I can write:

  col :participants do |event|
    event.participants
  end.search do |collection, term, column, sql_column|
    collection = Event.search_participants(term)
  end
  

I would like to put these together, but I cannot as You cannot use partial: … with the block syntax So I tried

col :participants do |event|
  tag.ul do
    JSON.parse(event.participants).each do |participant|
      tag.li participant
    end.search do |collection, term, column, sql_column|
      collection = Decision.search_participants(term)
    end
  end
end

but this render just an empty <ul></ul>. What am I doing wrong here?

Funnily I’ve skimmed through some old documentation too and it seems like overriding search_column method would suffice in the past.

[matt-riemer]

Is your category a belongs_to object? Or just a string?

That query makes me think datatables is detecting it like a string ILIKE %93% but the decision_category_id makes me think it’s a belongs_to? Not sure what’s up there.

Something like this should work tho:

col(:category, search: { as: :select, collection: EventCategory.all, multiple: true }) do |obj|
  obj.category.to_s
end

or

col(:category_id, as: :integer, search: { as: :select, collection: EventCategory.all, multiple: true }) do |obj|
  obj.category.to_s
end

Or maybe the join syntax could work

datatable do
  col 'category.name'
end

collection do
   Event.joins(:category).all
end

[matt-riemer]

thanks for coming back with the solution!