Learn Algolia, Rails and React-storybook

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

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Storybook is a UI component development environment for React, Vue, and Angular. With that, you can develop UI components without running your app.

Here I show how best to configure a React Storybook to use [Typescript](/q/typescript) (with TSX). This lets you write your reusable components with maximal type safety. Please see the provided code for the full source.

Configure React Storybook for use with Typescript

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

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Learn how to test ActiveRecord named scopes using RSpec.

In this lesson, we will test a `User` model that will have a `by_ci_email` method 
that we will define on the model. We will test this method in our `user_spec.rb` file and pass in a lower case email argument to demonstrate that the `by_ci_email` method is functioning correctly by finding the correct user.

Test ActiveRecord Named Scopes

Learn how to test ActiveRecord validations using RSpec.

In this lesson we'll write a test that expects the `name` attribute to be present on the User model instance. We'll see that at first this test fails because we need to add this validation on the model.

Test ActiveRecord Validations

Learn how to test custom ActiveRecord validations using RSpec.

In this lesson we'll write a test that expects the `email` to be found on the `invitations` table. We'll see that at first this test fails because we need to add the custom validation on the user model. Once we implement the validation and create the `InvitedValidator`, the test will pass.

Test Custom ActiveRecord Validations

If you make a mistake when naming your database column, and have data that you want to keep unchanged. You can use the change method with the rename_column definition in your migrations files to update a single column name in your database.

Rename A Database Column with Ruby on Rails Active Record Migrations

If you want to give the users the ability to follow or become friends with each other. Rails lets you create a join table in your database and have it reference the user database table. 

You can use Active Record to associate the new table with User table by using the `class_name` method

Create Active Record Self-Referential Relationships In Ruby on Rails

When you create a User model with Devise using the command `rails generate devise User`. Devise will create  default columns in the database for your User model. To add your own columns for your users you can create a new Rails migration and add any columns you want for your users.

Add Custom Fields to a Devise User Model with a Ruby on Rails Migration

[Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/) is a framework that allows you to develop components in isolation. It is ideal for a variety of use cases, most commonly when you're building some shared component toolkit. As such, Nx comes with a dedicated package `@nrwl/storybook` that adds a series of useful code generators to add storybook to an existing React library, but also to automatically generate stories and more.

Use Storybook to Develop React Components in Nx

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

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[Nx](https://nx.dev) combines a lot of the best tools on the market, integrates them, and provides tooling to provide the best possible developer experience. One such pair is [Cypress](https://www.cypress.io/) and [Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/). Storybook allows developing components in isolation, which is also a great basis for testing components, which is where Cypress shines.
In this lesson, we're exploring some of the `@nrwl/storybook` code generation utilities that allow you to not only configure Storybook for a React application but automatically also set up a Cypress test configuration for it along with some spec files generated from the Storybook stories.

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