Help needed in specifying conditions in pagination

Hi,
In a controller, I add to the default list action a condition, thus:

def list
@user_pages, @users = paginate :users,
:conditions => @query,
:per_page => 10
end

and @query is defined somewhere in the controller as

@query = “user_name like ‘%Smith%’”

where user_name is an attribute of User.

Result: The condition pulls out the whole table, not just the users with
partial name value “Smith”.

What’s the correct way of specifying a condition in pagination using a
variable? (Can’t find an example in the Rails API doc).

Thanks for the help,
gk