Discuss Autocomplete feature for Medications

[adriaanbd]

When a user is adding a medication name, autocomplete should suggest available options from general Medicine table.

Here are some resources I found:

• https://gorails.com/episodes/global-autocomplete-search
• Ransack G=gem used in GoRails screencast
• Postgres solution
• Heroku solution
• SearchKick gem
• SelectizeJs
• Other JS solution

Let's talk about how we will implement this feature. It looks simple from high-level. Just send the params on the searchbar to a database query and get back results with top x amount of results. It has to be fast though.

[rvvergara]

We can talk about this more when we get to the frontend part. High level idea of it is this:

1. We have a text box (search box)
2. Whenever a user types a certain set of characters we make a query to the server for a certain endpoint that returns to us a collection of words
3. We then render those collection of words

This search box component we can build from scratch or even find a react component for it. For the backend it's just a matter of creating an "autocomplete" controller which have an action that might look like the ff:

def index
 query_str = params[:query_string]
 autocomplete_results = Medication.find_by_terms(query_str)
 # find_by_terms is a method we can define in the Medication model
render :autocomplete_results, locals: { results: autocomplete_results }, status: :ok
end

Of course there are gems that can help us with "find_by_terms" method above. So yeah this should not be a big problem for us later on :)

[adriaanbd]

https://github.com/Casecommons/pg_search