Search Function | Laravel.io

replied 8 years ago

I think there are ways to improve it, but can you start by telling us what you are actually passing through as your arguments?

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ronb1985

replied 8 years ago

I have already improved it myself a bit (the controller code), edited my post.

What I am passing through is either a simple search for an appointment name, or (and what this helper is about) a month or a number and a month. For example, if I seach for "october" or "oct", I want all the appointments for october to be displayed. When I search for "1 oct" or "1 october" for example, I want all the appointments for the first of october to be displayed.

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thomastkim

replied 8 years ago

Hmm...Did you incorrectly copy/paste it? There is no $order or $by variables, but you are ordering by those two. There is also no sort, but you are returning that.

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ronb1985

replied 8 years ago

Ah yeah, I left those out because my main question was about the search function, but I've edited my post and put them back in.

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thomastkim

replied 8 years ago

Solution

Here's what I would change. These are just suggestions, and I haven't tested it out so let me know if anything doesn't work or if you don't agree with any changes. :)

First, I would just rename $by to $sort and remove the first if-else statement.

public function index($order = 'date', $sort = 'desc')
{
    // Remove this next line
    // if ($by == 'asc') $sort = "desc"; else $sort = "asc";

I don't see a point in the if-else statement since you can just pass the argument directly.

After that, if you use Carbon, you can actually really simplify the searching function into about 5 lines of code. For example (explanation below)...

public static function dateSearch($searchString)
{
    $searchString = trim($searchString);

    if (strpos($searchString, ' ') !== false)
    {
    	return Carbon::parse($searchString)->format('m-d');
    }
	
    return Carbon::parse($searchString)->format('m-');
}

You trim the string like you did before. If the string then contains a space, we return a m-d format, which would be something like "10-21" for October 21 (today's date).

Otherwise, we return the "m-" format, which is something like "10-" for October.

The Carbon::parse method will correctly parse "october", "1 october", etc. It takes care of all that for you, and Carbon already comes with Laravel. Then, since you are returning just a string and not returning an array (I didn't see why you needed to return an array), you could take out even more lines of code and just do this:

$searchResult = Search::dateSearch($search);

$appointments = Appointment::orderBy($order, $sort)->where(function ($query) use ($search, $searchResult)
{
    $query->where('appointment', 'LIKE', '%'. $search .'%')
        ->orWhere('date', 'LIKE', '%2015-' . $searchResult . '%')->get();
})->Paginate(25);

return view('appointments.index', compact('appointments', 'sort', 'search'));

You directly pass the $searchResult to the closure and search by that, which will be either "10-" if you just searched for the month or "10-21" if you searched for both the month and day.

Last updated 8 years ago.

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ronb1985

replied 8 years ago

Thanks, I used Carbon before for other things but I never knew these things, I can look into it and learn a whole lot more. I will let you know how things go :)

Edit: Awesome stuff, it's working just the way you wrote it. It's pretty neat and simple and I love it. Thanks for the advice and the tips you gave me. One thing I would like to mention though.

In my view, I have the following to sort results either descending or ascending:

<th onclick="location.href='{{ URL::route('appointments.order', array('order' => 'appointment', 'by' => $sort, 'search' => $search )) }}'"><p>Appointment</p></th>

So, by default, my controller returns "desc" for the $sort. Once clicked on the link, my controller gets the $sort back, which is then "desc", so that is why I have the if statement, to change the $sort in my controller to "asc" and then return it into the view. Too complicated? I would love to know a better way ofcourse :)

Edit2: Ah, I see ofcourse there is a parse error once the search is just a simple word like "test", because carbon cannot parse it. So I need to check wether or not the search string is an actual date like "jan" or "january" for example. But I can manage that :) Your suggestions are already helping a lot.

Last updated 8 years ago.

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thomastkim

replied 8 years ago

Oh okay. Yea, I think changing the sort field would work then. Another possible way is to use JavaScript to alter it, but either way works.

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