Jon Yurek wrote:
This is the first release of a new plugin for making very Rubyish queries. I never really liked AR's find method syntax, and all the replacements I've seen didn't make it any easier to join on multiple models at the same time, so I wrote Squirrel.
posts = Post.find do user.email =~ "%thoughtbot%" tags.name === %w( ruby rails ) created_on <=> [ Time.now - 2.weeks, Time.now - 1.week ] end
It overloads the base find method to take a block to build conditions, including any and all association joins. You reference them like you would in a normal block of Ruby.
You reference associations by whatever name you gave to it in the has_many, belongs_to, etc. You can then access all the columns and relationships on that model. It is rather specific, though, and will raise errors if you misspell your relationships or don’t pluralize right.
And you simply reference columns by their normal names and use any of ==, ===, <=>, =~, >=, <=, >, and < on them pretty much like you’d expect to be able to (before you ask, yes, I cribbed the syntax from ez_where, since it makes sense). It handles nil values in == with a quick trip to IS NULL and it handles negation of conditions through the unary -.
It's not as full featured as I'd like it -- yet, but IMHO it looks a lot better, and it's still useful.
You can read further about it at http://giantrobots.thoughtbot.com/2006/9/29/an-improvement-for-querying-in-rails
Or you can install it via script/plugin install http://svn.thoughtbot.com/plugins/squirrel
Jon Yurek http://www.thoughtbot.com
This looks really cool. I have a use for this in a project. I will let you know how it works out.
Matthew Margolis blog.mattmargolis.net
