Exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

I got an error about Array#unzip, so I dropped this in:

class Array def unzip( n=2 ) (0…n).map { |i| map { |tuple| tuple[i] } } end end

Trevor: Ah, silly me, Array#unzip is defined in my rubaidh_platform plugin where I keep all the generic stuff I use across projects. I should copy the definition across into this plugin to make it independent.

As for using it with will_paginate, I already am. I can’t remember if I’ve changed something since you popped by, but I’m now doing something along the lines of:

class FooController < ApplicationController
  resource_search

def index @foos = Foo.paginate :page => params[:page] end #... end

which does the right thing. resource_search, in the background, creates an around_filter (by default just on index, though you can specify additional collection methods) which yields with_search_terms which is using with_scope. All very neat, if I do say so myself.

Rails Futzer: You’re absolutely right. In the application I extracted the plugin from and the application I first pushed it into I didn’t have any protected attributes for the models I was searching. I’ll be sure to implement that when I first need it. Patches gratefully accepted, of course.

Great stuff. I’m glad to see someone’s talking about this. I tried the plugin, and it works for me except that I had to change “model.constantize.with_search_terms(params[model.downcase]) do” to “model.constantize.with_search_terms(params) do”.

Great stuff. I’m glad to see someone’s talking about this. I tried the plugin, and it works for me except that I had to change “model.constantize.with_search_terms(params[model.downcase]) do” to “model.constantize.with_search_terms(params[model.underscore]) do”.

(This is my third post on this, and I was a bit confused — I got thrown off because multi-word model names weren’t working).

Hi, I seem to be having a bit of trouble getting your plugin to work for me. Am I right in thinking that all that is necessary is to include the resource_search call in the controller? And this automatically wraps any method defined in the model in the scope of the conditions? Including inherited methods like find?

I’m using edge rails – would that make a difference? Also I’m using the restful_authentication plugin which may be conflicting(?).

Nice plugin Graeme.

I modified it to add an OR #{table_name}.#{key} IS NULL if the value was nil to allow empty to allow matching nulls. might be mysql specific, I’m not sure. Here’s what my modified with_search_terms method looks like:

        def with_search_terms(params)
          conditions = params.blank? ? [] : params.delete_if do |key, value|
           !column_names.include?(key)
          end.collect do |key, value|
            condition = "LOWER(#{table_name}.#{key}) LIKE ?"
            condition = "(#{condition} OR #{table_name}.#{key} IS NULL)" if value.nil?
            [condition, "%#{value.downcase if value}%"]
          end.unzip
          conditions.length > 1 && conditions[0] = conditions[0].join(' AND ')
          conditions = conditions.flatten.compact
          with_scope :find => {:conditions => conditions.empty? ? nil : conditions} do
            yield
          end
        end

sure that will not look pretty

I also ran into issues with the page links will_paginate generated if the results ended up paginated. Seems in 1.2.3 has issues handling nested params, so the links that will_paginate generated were somewhat munged. Ryan Kinderman discusses the issue in greater detail and provides a plugin to fix it over at http://kinderman.net/articles/2007/02/07/passing-arrays-and-nested-params-to-url_for-in-rails

Maybe helpful to others not using edge rails.

Nice!

<

p> I added this little helper to your form_helper.rb which (I hope) encapsulates the expected naming conventions for search field (and remembers their values)

        def search_field_for(model, field, options = {})
          text_field_tag "#{model}[#{field}]", params[model].nil? ? nil : params[model][field]
        end

<

p> I’m having issues with

will_paginate

though – it’s making a bit of a mess of the search parameters in the navigation links, losing rather than quoting the special characters. Is it something I’m doing wrong?

@Toby I haven’t tried this plugin yet, but if all the params are nested under the model name (model[x], model[y]), you can get at all of them by just doing: find(:first, :conditions => params[:model])

Is that what you were talking about?

Hi Graeme. I was looking at this plugin today. Very nice. It is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do on models in my application. In reading the comments and in using it I noted that you have to prefix the key/val with the model name. I have a little hack to let you do it this way or the ARes way that Toby mentions above.

Before I clean it up (it isn’t much), are you still using/maintaining/accepting patches for this plugin?

Thanks for your hard work. Don

Neat plugin. For determining the model names from the controller, you might want to look at how the resource_controller plugin handles it. It opionally lets you specificy a different model from the one derived from the controller name, too.

For the SQL, you might want to look at the squirrel plugin just for fun. It’s a neat plugin to Rubyize the conditions for AR#find. You can obtain just the SQL by using it with Model.find(:query) do foo == ‘bar’ end.conditions.to_sql

Thanks!