were to put a method

rubyonrails-talk
1

Try this: (Assuming you have a Model defined as: Prop and that model has an attribute called "category":

<% Prop.find_all_by_category("car").each do |prop| %> <li><a class="list_item" href=""<%=h prop.year %>&nbsp;<%=h prop.title %></a></li> <% end %>

-Danimal

2

Well i tried what you said, and it worked. one thing though. I have multiple items in my category column in the db, seperated by spaces.. and this is what i tried, with no luck if there are more than one item.

  def find_all_by_category(item)     self.find(:all, :params => {:category => /#{item}/})   end

3

Just incase anyone was wondering, this is what i came up with after more reading of the api and spending some time on freenode, hope it helps you.   def self.find_all_by_category(item)     self.find( :all, :conditions => ["category like ?", "%#{item}%"] )   end

4

Ilya,

That looks good! Glad you got it working. Basically, it's a way to do matches on substrings of category. I.e. if I have a category of "Car" I could do: Prop.find_all_by_category("ar") and it would match "Car" and anything else like that.

The one thing I'd caution you on: this may end up being confusing in the future. "find_all_by_X" (where X is some attribute on that model) is already part of AR associations. So you are redefining an existing method to work differently, which may confuse you or mess you up later. My recommendation is to call it something differently, maybe like: find_by_category_substring(item).

Just a suggestion though. :slight_smile:

-Danimal