Laravel Scout with Meilisearch filtering not working with >, >=, <, and <= operators

Question

I am trying to implement Meilisearch on my Laravel application.

for some reason I'm not able to filter decimal fields ( price , mrp etc..) using > , >= , < , and <= operators as explained on Meilisearch Documentation .

        Product::search($request->search, function ($meilisearch, $query, $options) {
            $options['filter'] = 'price >= 1'; // This is the line that causes the issue.
            return $meilisearch->search($query, $options);
        })->raw();

If I do something like above, I get 0 hits, altho there are many records that satisfy that condition ( price >= 1 ):

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

---

Also, I want to learn, how can I apply multiple fiters. Like, in actual scenario. we need to filter the products by min and max price. I realized that Laravel scout doesn't allow us to use advanced where clauses ( where('price', '>=', $request->min_price) ) like eloquent

I want to do something like this using Scout and Meilisearch .

        $query = Product::search($request->search);
        
        if ($request->min_price) {
            $query->where('price', '>=', $request->min_price);
        }
        if ($request->max_price) {
            $query->where('price', '<=', $request->max_price);
        }

Answer 1

A hacky way that we are using at the moment is to place the operator into the field:

    $query = Product::search($request->search);
        
    if ($request->min_price) {
        $query->where('price >', $request->min_price);
    }
    if ($request->max_price) {
        $query->where('price <', $request->max_price);
    }

That way Scout creates the proper (eg price >= {min_price} ) expression. But beware that this is just workaround and does not necessarily work with other search engines supported by Scout.

Please watch Scout's Meilisearch driver for why this works: https://github.com/laravel/scout/blob/9.x/src/Engines/MeiliSearchEngine.php#L163-L188