Last night (yes, Sunday) I spent an hour or so adding the missing features to the Journal.Rails app. You can now search and sort by date and category.

I know what you're thinking — Wow! What's so great about that. Well, I'm happy to report it was both simple and easy to do. Just like Domino, it's not scary at all.

With the PHP version of Journal.ntf I never got round to adding search. Mainly because I didn't know how and never bothered to learn. With Rails it's easy, by nature of its architecture and took me about ten minutes to add. To see how I did it you can read this Wiki page. All I had to do was add a Search action to the Journal controller:

def search
@query = params:q
@results = Entry.search params:q, :case => :sensitive
end

Then I add a matching file called search.rhtml to the Views folder and include this rHTML:

<p>Searched for "<%= @query %>".
<% if @results.empty? %>
Nothing found</p>
<% else %>
Found <%= pluralize(@results.size, "matching entry") %>.</p>
<table>
<% for entry in @results %>
<tr>

Ordered views was a doddle and makes so much sense I worked this out myself. I added an action called "bydate" to the controller like so:

def bydate
@entry_pages, @entries = paginate :entries, 
:order_by => 'diary_date, subject', :per_page => 10
render :action => 'list'
end

Note that the last line tells the action to use the list.rhtml (default "view") to render the list of entries. We can use list.rhtml like a $$ViewTemplateDefault and then use actions to add new "view" and alter the column/sort order.

After adding the bydate action to the controller we can access the results at the URL /journal/bydate.

This is merely a few simple tweaks to the site and is just me playing around still. It's very rough. Note that I've not mimicked the Domino Categorised View feature. Because I don't like them and never use them. Categorised Views might be ok for users of a system that's trying to mimic its Notes counterpart, but nowhere else. Ever seen a categorised view on any other website? I rest my case.