ActiveRecord.find with hash?

Rails
1

The Agile Development book suggests one can pass a hash to the find
class method on an ActiveRecord entity:

hash = { :firstname => “john”, :lastname => “smith” }
Customer.find(:all, hash)

However, this doesn’t seem to actually work.

Is there any way tod o this? I have a hash with keys that symbols
matching valid attributes of the entity, and values that are the values
I want to match. Surely there is some ActiveRecord method to find
objects based on this, no?

2

On 19 Feb 2008, at 21:37, Jonathan R. wrote:

The Agile Development book suggests one can pass a hash to the find
class method on an ActiveRecord entity:

hash = { :firstname => “john”, :lastname => “smith” }
Customer.find(:all, hash)

However, this doesn’t seem to actually work.

Customer.find :all, :conditions => hash

3

I’d go even one deeper:
Customer.find(:all, hash)

I’ve been using code like this more often in RESTful controllers. By
accumulating the find options for the #index action I can use it to
serve several purposes. The most obvious example would be for filter
+paging:

requested_page = params[:page] || 0
find_options = {:order=>:name, :offset=>requested_page *
page_size, :limit=>page_size}
find_options[:conditions] = [‘name LIKE ?’, “#{params[:name]}”] unless
params[:name].blank?
Customer.find(:all, find_options)

The important thing to be aware of is that the hash to be passed to
ARec#find comes after a required first parameter (symbols :first
or :all, an id, an array of ids).

HTH,
AndyV

On Feb 20, 5:51 am, Frederick C. [email protected]

4

@Jonathan – sorry, I didn’t read yours closely enough. The thing
that you’re missing is that the parameters for the sql query are added
to the hash keyed by :conditions. Hopefully the rest of my response
clears that up.

5

Thanks! I had missed that somehow, it is clear now. Certainly a very
useful interface to ‘find’, I agree.

AndyV wrote:

@Jonathan – sorry, I didn’t read yours closely enough. The thing
that you’re missing is that the parameters for the sql query are added
to the hash keyed by :conditions. Hopefully the rest of my response
clears that up.