Hi all,
as you may have gathered I am a newbie to rails and programming. I want to count the number of enquiries in the database and produce it as a number in the view preferably in the index page. All I want is the number of items in the database and everytime ones added or deleted the number will go up or down.
Something like this:
Enquries Today: 'whatever the number of them are'
Thank you clever people!!!!
Your help you been greatly appreciated
Assuming the name of your model is Item, you can do it this way:
Enquries Today: <%= Item.count %>
Just replace "Item" with whatever your model is called. #count is a method provided by ActiveRecord, that will return the number of records in the table that the table belongs to, "items" for example.
* in the model that the table belongs to, "items" for example.
Argh, in the table that model belongs to, of course. So sorry. 
Oh, that's probably because "enquiry" is a local variable. You need to call the #count _class method_ on your model. So you'll have to do it like this:
Enquries Today: <%= Enquiry.count %>
Notice, I use a capital E. The #count method is not available on instances of Enquiry (a specific record in your database), but as a class method of your model. "Enquiry" in your case.