Search Motorbikes Functionality

Searching functionality

For the search functionality, I decided to watch the Laracast videos on search rather than trying figure it out from the documentation. And I was surprised how easy this was to do! I already had a search bar in the top of the navigation, I updated the action for the search and in the MotorbikeController.php file I wrote an if statement to see if there was a search request, and to return a list of bikes that had that in the title.

if (request('search')) {
            $motorbikes = Motorbike::where('title', 'like', '%' . request('search') . '%')->get();
            //dd($motorbikes);
            return view('pages/listings', [
                'motorbikes' => $motorbikes,
            ]);
        }

Code Block 1: MotorbikeContoller if there is a search request

I had to create some more listings to test the search, which ended up taking a lot longer than expected, as I had not tested this enough and I had to solve a lot of logic within my code, mainly with the images. And when updating the motorbike, it was updating a different bike. In my edit method I had edit(Request $request, $motorbike) {}

I didn’t specify that the $motorbike was a Motorbike class instance. So its now edit(Request $request, Motorbike $motorbike) {}.

I also suddenly realised, this was the error I was getting earlier with my MotorbikePolicy, with the motorbike id getting passed rather than the motorbike object`. Two birds one stone 😊 Anyway, back to the search!

I added a scope function to the Motorbike Model

    public function scopeFilter($query, array $filters)
    {
        $query
            ->where('title', 'like', '%' . request('search') . '%')
            ->orWhere('summary', 'like', '%' . request('search') . '%')
            ->orWhere('description', 'like', '%' . request('search') . '%')
            ->orWhere('make', 'like', '%' . request('search') . '%')
            ->orWhere('model', 'like', '%' . request('search') . '%');
    }

Code Block 2: ScopeFilter added to the Motorbike model

And in the MotorbikeController.php file I change the index() method to: to filter all the posts if there was a search query

    public function index() : View
    {
        return view('pages/listings', [
            'motorbikes' => Motorbike::latest()->filter(request(['search']))->get(),
        ]);
    }

Code Block 3: Filter motorbikes before passing the results back

Conclusion

The incorporation of a search functionality in the motorbike listings proved to be easy, using Laracast tutorials. The controller logic and model scope enhancements effectively filter motorbikes based on search queries across multiple attributes. This implementation enhances the user experience, providing a seamless and efficient search feature.