Rails, search with Ransack gem, downcase a string

Question

I am trying to write a search form for my shops using ransack. Currently, I can search using the name_or_address_cont option which looks EITHER in the name OR in the address. If I had a shop Adidas in London and I type Adidas London there would be no results. Therefore I looked for a way to concatenate the two attributes and search by the new one. What I found in some old posts was the following code:

  ransacker :search_name, :formatter => proc {|v| UnicodeUtils.downcase(v) } do |parent|
    Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('LOWER',
      [Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('concat_ws', [' ', parent.table[:name], parent.table[:address], parent.table[:id]])]
    )
  end

Which is supposed to search by a shop's name, address, and id. However, when I run I get an error in the UnicodeUtils. I tried changing it to v.downcase! but I get another error. Any idea how to handle this problem? Thank you!

Answer 1

There were two mistakes... The first one I found how to fix in the documentation where they have an example for full_name link

Which looks like

ransacker :full_name, formatter: proc { |v| v.mb_chars.downcase.to_s } do |parent|
  Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('LOWER',
    [Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('concat_ws',
      [' ', parent.table[:first_name], parent.table[:last_name]])])
end

Also, it seems that the joining ' ' should be replaced by Arel::Nodes.build_quoted(' '). Found that in this issue