The idea is that you provide the query and plugin does the rest (splits query to keywords and compose where statement).

This can be very useful in case you just want to filter list of records by some query, you have autocomplete field, … or something similar.

Example

View

  <% form_tag request.path, :method => 'get' do %>
    <%= text_field_tag :query, params[:query] %>
  <% end %>

Model

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_simply_searchable
  end

  # Columns: id, login, email, crypted_password, salt

Controller

  class UsersController < ApplicationController
    def index
      @users = User.simple_search(params[:query]).all
    end
  end

Query examples

Simple query

  User.simple_search("vlado")
  # => SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE (users.id LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.login LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.email LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.crypted_password LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.salt LIKE '%vlado%')

You can also provide :columns => :column1, :column2, ... option to limit search only to those columns

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_simply_searchable :columns => :login, :email
  end

  User.simple_search("vlado")
  # => SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE (users.login LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.email LIKE '%vlado%')

More complex query

  User.simple_search("vlado, cingel")
  # will search for users matching 'vlado' and 'cingel' keywords
  # => SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ((users.login LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.email LIKE '%vlado%') AND (users.login LIKE '%cingel%' OR users.email LIKE '%cingel%'))

NOTE: With proper use of indexes this plugin can work quite well in most cases, but in case you have a large and complex database it is usually much better idea to use some search daemon like Thinking Sphinx.

More info

http://github.com/cingel/simple_search