Need guidance for a simple search Rails application

Question

I am learning Ruby. In the meantime, I have to make a simple app for a small company that I know how to make in PHP and MySQL. I have not started learning Rails yet (first I want to finish the Ruby book I have started). But I was thinking if with a little guidance may be I can make this app in Rails. If I can do it, that will be great. The requirement is like this:

• I am given an Excel file that has 11 columns. Each row has information about one item. Each row is unique. Right now the company uses this excel file to search for required information, and they want me to make a web app for this.

• This Excel data and future data will be inserted into the database in bulk, using CSV imports. I think there is no need to break the table, and our app can just have a single table to search from.

• The search will be done using 2 columns from the table.

• One person will have the privilege to edit searched records.

• Only 4 people will be using the app for now. There will be no option to sign-up for a new account.

• The home page will have the search form (two fields, user can fill both or one).

I will appreciate (a lot) any pointers, guidance and help with this. I can make this in PHP, but I'd love to make it in Rails.

Answer 1

I didnt exactly get your question. Are you looking for a way to search for the records ? If the number of rows is huge and you need full text search, you may need to look at Solr or Sphinx or AWS CloudSearch for fast queries. If time is not a big concern, you may even be able to do away with simple ActiveRecord queries (do look at squeel gem too : https://github.com/ernie/squeel).