What is filterrific? ‘filterrific’ gem is used for filtering the data only. It is a Rails Engine plugin that makes it easy to filter, search, and sort your ActiveRecord lists.

Features of filterrific gem:

It Integrates with pagination
Filters can be reset to default settings
Makes heavy use of ActiveRecord Scopes
API option to use Filterrific with Rails API mode. Just use gem ‘filterrific’, require: ‘filterrific_api’ in your Gemfile
ActionController helpers to shuttle filter params from ActionView forms to ActiveRecord based models, and to return matching records back from ActiveRecord to ActionView
It depends on ActiveRecord scopes for building DB queries
Can be used for HTML/JS/JSON/XML response formats
It is used to run filter settings from a filter UI to the controller and ActiveRecord
It persists filter settings in the HTTP session or DB for saved searches

Dependencies:

Rails – 3.x and above
ActiveRecord 4 and above
jQuery and Asset pipeline for form observers and spinner

What I need to do?

Need to define ActiveRecord Scopes
Need to build and style filter form and record lists

How to use it?

Let us assume that we want to show the lists of ‘Students’ that can be filtered by application’s users.

Step 1:

#Gem File
gem ‘filterrific’

Step 2:

Add Filterrific to ‘student’ model:

filterrific( default_filter_params: { sorted_by: 'created_at_desc' }, available_filters: [ :sorted_by, :search_query, :with_country_id, ] ) # define ActiveRecord scopes for # :search_query, :sorted_by, :with_country_id

Step 3:

Use Filterrific in index method of StudentsController:

def index @filterrific = initialize_filterrific( Student, params[:filterrific] ) or return @students = @filterrific.find.page(params[:page]) respond_to do |format| format.html format.js end end

Step 4:

Here’s the lists of students’ data is showing in the view. Lastly, the Filterrific ActionView API is used to create the views: