Advanced search in realm iOS

Question

I want to perform a search on an entity I have (using realm-cocoa ) For example:

@interface Person : RLMObject
@property NSString *firstName;
@property NSString *lastName;
@property NSString *nickName;
@end

I have a UIViewController that holds a UITableView that is displaying a list of all the Person entities, I also have a UISearchBar above the table.

Now, What I want is when a user enters certain text in the search bar, to search if this text is contained in any of my properties , also, I want to sort the results based on relevance.

For example, if have have a person named Sandro and another named Alessandro, when i'm searching for the text 'Sandro' I want to see the person named Sandro first, if i search 'San' I want to sort alphabetically (meaning Alessandro will be first).

I have not found a method in realm that can help me achieve this.

Answer 1

In Objective-C you need to declare a RLMResult object to get the array of Person objects and using the sortedResultUsingKeyPath method you can sort your result

Try with this

In Objective-C

RLMRealm * realm = [RLMRealm defaultRealm];
[realm transactionWithBlock:^{
    [realm addObject:[Person personWithFirstName:@"Reinier"]];
    [realm addObject:[Person personWithFirstName:@"Test"]];
}];

NSString * searchValue = @"Re";

//Here we search for objects that containts in the firstName the value of searchValue string
RLMResults * result2 = [[Person objectsWithPredicate:[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"firstName CONTAINS %@",searchValue]] sortedResultsUsingKeyPath:@"firstName"  ascending:true];
NSMutableArray * arrayOfPerson = [NSMutableArray array];
for (int i = 0; i< [result2 count];i++)
{
    [arrayOfPerson addObject:[result2 objectAtIndex:i]];
}

NSLog(@"%@",arrayOfPerson);

this is in Swift

yourArrayOfPersons = realm?.objects(Person.self).sorted(byKeyPath: "firstName")