I've just read three* different messages on the list, all posted within a day of each other, and all having problems with the same thing - rails built in pagination.
The common misconception seems to be that rails built in pagination works as follows:
# grab a list of all the females @users = User.find(:all, :conditions => ['gender = ?', 'F'])
# paginate the list: @user_pages, @users = paginate(:users, :per_page => 10)
The above will paginate a list of users, however, it will NOT have the conditions applied to it that you specified in the first find statement (grabbing a list of females). The two statements are not related to each other. The first finds all the females and stores the results in the @users instance variable. The second finds and paginates _ALL_ of the users and stores them in the @users ivar, overwriting the original contents. This is most likely _not_ what you want.
If you wanted to paginate a list of all the females, the correct way to do it is the following
# paginate a list of females @user_pages, @users = paginate(:users, :conditions => ['gender = ?', 'F'], :per_page => 10)
now, having said that, please be aware that the rails built in pagination has been deprecated! (see here for more details http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/6992) In other words, do not use it for future projects!
Instead, you should be using something like the will_paginate plugin (you can read about it here: http://errtheblog.com/post/4791)
Hopefully this will help reduce some confusion..
Mike
* the messages I'm referring to.. http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/92190b21dc5c08f5/f4849b96c2b5a943#f4849b96c2b5a943
