Returning Search Results in Rails

I am having a problem implementing a special kind of search for my Rails application. I am working on an achievement system where you can search for a set of users in a search form (e.g., the query being "Ross, Adam, Jake") and it returns all of the common achievements that the users have unlocked (e.g., if users Ross, Adam, and Jake all had an achievement named "You are winner!"). I have three tables, one for achievements, one for users, and a join table. We have tested the associa开发者_如何学Pythontions and such, so we know that works.

My first idea was to put the search terms in an array and get the search results for each item in the array and place them into respective "search result arrays". Then, I was thinking to go through each item in search result array 1 to see if it appears in both of the other result arrays. The objects that appear in all three of the search result arrays would be returned and displayed on a page.

Is there an easy way to implement this without writing a bunch of my own code? Are there some functions I should know about? Any help will be appreciated!

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Well, both Ransack and it's predecessor (MetaSearch) are useful gems for creating complex search forms.

In general I think you want to do something like select distinct achievement ids for user ids in an array. Off the top of my head I'm not quite sure how you should write it... others may know.

Look at the documentation on MetaSearch (more established) and see if you see a pattern that fits, if not check Ransack (more advanced).

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You can use some autocomplete plugin for user names and convert the names to ids on the fly, that way you won't have to deal with converting user names to ids in backend later.

For common achievements, if a user can have a achievement only once, aggregating the results in join table and counting the results with achievement ids would be the way to go.

You can provide more details for a more detailed answer. :)

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You can use Sunspot which is allows easy solr integration with Ruby and Rails