Forum: Ruby on Rails Arel limit Where if fields are present

I trying to create a select using Arel but I'm passing three parameters, 
I
want to include the parameters only if they are different to nil or 
blank.

Here is my method:

def self.advsearch(summary_description, specialties, place)

        User.joins(:experience,:summary,:information)
                .where(Information.arel_table[:business].eq(false))
                .where(Experience.arel_table[:description].matches("%#{summary_description}%")
              .or(Experience.arel_table[:description].matches("%#{summary_description.capitalize}%"))
              .or(Experience.arel_table[:job_title].matches("%#{summary_description}%"))
              .or(Experience.arel_table[:job_title].matches("%#{summary_description.capitalize}%"))
              .or(Summary.arel_table[:summary_description].matches("%#{summary_description}%"))
              .or(Summary.arel_table[:specialties].matches("%#{specialties}%"))
              .or(Information.arel_table[:address].matches("%#{place}%")))
              .order
              .uniq
end

I would like to do something like this:

def self.advsearch(summary_description, specialties, place)

        User.joins(:experience,:summary,:information)
                .where(Information.arel_table[:business].eq(false))
                .where(Experience.arel_table[:description].matches("%#{summary_description}%") 
unless !summary_description.nil?
              .or(Experience.arel_table[:description].matches("%#{summary_description.capitalize}%")) 
unless !summary_description.nil?
              .or(Experience.arel_table[:job_title].matches("%#{summary_description}%")) 
unless !summary_description.nil?
              .or(Experience.arel_table[:job_title].matches("%#{summary_description.capitalize}%")) 
unless !summary_description.nil?
              .or(Summary.arel_table[:summary_description].matches("%#{summary_description}%")) 
unless !summary_description.nil?
              .or(Summary.arel_table[:specialties].matches("%#{specialties}%")) 
unless !summary.nil?
              .or(Information.arel_table[:address].matches("%#{place}%"))) 
unless !place.nil?
              .order
              .uniq
end

I trying to google something similar, but I didn't find anything like 
that.

Thanks in advance for your help.

On Tuesday, 18 December 2012 11:43:22 UTC-5, Jean wrote:
>
The pieces don't all have to be chained together in one line, so you can 
do
something like this:

condition = Arel::Nodes::False.new
condition =
condition.or(Experience.arel_table[:description].matches("%#{summary_description}%")
unless summary_description.blank?
...etc, just keep ORing on additional things to condition...
User.joins(...).where(condition)

BTW, you probably won't actually need the repetitions with capitalize -
Arel implements the 'matches' operator with case-insensitive matching on
DBs that are case-sensitive by default (for instance, here for
PG: 
https://github.com/rails/arel/blob/master/lib/arel...
).

Depending on the specific needs of your advanced search, you may also 
want
to look into something like Sunspot (http://sunspot.github.com/), as it
handles some fairly complicated query parsing and allows for 
multi-valued
fields (great for things like 'specialties').

--Matt Jones