Thinking Sphinx Faceted Search Implementation Examples?

I am putting together a repository-type rails 3 site. I have Thinking Sphinx installed and working on my site, insomuch as I can enter urls like localhost:3000/articles?search=test&page=2 and it will return the expected results.

I'm new to 开发者_JAVA技巧Rails (and web dev in general); I think I can manage the model and controller aspects of this, but the views so far have me stumped. I have a sidebar I would like to use as the search interface. The closest I have come is this (rendered as part of a sidebar partial):

<% form_tag @search, :method => :get do %> 
    <%= text_field_tag :search, params[:search] %> 
    <%= submit_tag "Search"%> 
<% end %>

The search method is in my articles#index controller, and when I test it when the browser is pointed to that page (routed as /articles), it works as expected, but with this odd url: localhost:3000/articles?utf8=✓&search=test&commit=Search. When the browser is first pointed to the root path, nothing happens.

So, I think these are the main issues I need to address:

1. EDIT - solved (see below)
2. Should I move the search methods to their own controller, or should they be part of the articles controller? For now, Article will be the only model indexed.
3. EDIT - solved (see below)
4. Does anyone have any good example code of a faceted search view using Rails 3 and Thinking Sphinx? Like I said, I am something of a neophyte and am a little flustered by the documentation that skims by the view implementation. However, I am fairly adept at reading and interpreting code as long as it is reasonably complete.

Thanks in advance!

Solved:

1. How do I make the 'Search' button call the index method before trying to search? (I have solved this by replacing @search with articles_path).

2. Solved using will_paginate, which I had trouble with before, but which seems to be working now.

Hey, This is an extract of how my site worked before i switched to solr

Product has many categories, we tell sphinx that we want to index them as facets

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base {    
    has_many :categorisations, :dependent => :destroy
    has_many :categories, :through => :categorisations        

 define_index do
    indexes product_name,
    indexes description
    indexes categories(:name), :as => :category,:facet => true      
 end 
}

Results Controller

class ResultsController < ApplicationController
  def index
      @facets = Product.facets params[:qt], :conditions => {:category => params[:category}},:page => params[:page], :per_page => 20
      @products = @facets.for
  end
end

And then in the view you can do something like

<% @facets.each do |facet, facet_options| %>
  <span><%= facet %></span>
  <ul>
  <% facet_options.each do |option, count| %>
    <li><%= link_to "#{option} (#{count})",
      :params => {facet => option, :page => 1} %></li>
  <% end %>
  </ul>
<% end %>