Setting dynamic variables

Rails
1

How do I set variables dynamically based on a search in the database? I
have a list of 30 words in a table called ‘words’ with a field
called…words. I would like to loop through them and for each word set
a variable. But I’m not sure how to do that. I’ve tried this but get an
error:

@thewordlist = Word.find(:all)

  if @thewordlist


    @thewordlist.each do |w|

      "@" + w.word = Publicsurvey.count(:conditions => ["word LIKE

?", w.word])

    end

  end

How should I do this?

2

On 18 Dec 2008, at 21:40, Pål Bergström wrote:

How do I set variables dynamically based on a search in the
database? I
have a list of 30 words in a table called ‘words’ with a field
called…words. I would like to loop through them and for each word
set
a variable. But I’m not sure how to do that. I’ve tried this but get
an
error:

Well there’s instance_variable_set, but this doesn’t sound like a good
idea. What if the work isn’t a legal variable name (eg if it has a
hyphen). What if the word is the same as some pre-existing instance
variable ? This also makes it hard to iterate over all the instance
variables set in this way. You’d be far better off bunging all that
data in a hash

Fred

3

On Dec 18, 2008, at 4:40 PM, Pål Bergström wrote:

if @thewordlist
@thewordlist.each do |w|
“@” + w.word = Publicsurvey.count(:conditions => [“word
LIKE ?”, w.word])
end
end

How should I do this?

Yikes! Not like that; what if one of the words is “thewordlist” :wink:

Word.find(:all) will return something that acts like an Array

@word_counts = {}
Word.find(:all).each do |w|
@word_counts[w.word] = Publicsurvey.count(:conditions => [“word
LIKE ?”, w.word])
end

Then you can process the @word_counts hash however you like.

It seems like you could push the work off to the database with
something like the following if the words don’t have any wildcards in
them that would cause LIKE to give a result different that just =.

sql = <<-END
SELECT words.word, count(publicsurveys.id) as ‘count’
FROM words LEFT OUTER JOIN publicsurveys ON publicsurvey.word =
words.word
GROUP BY words.word
END

@word_counts = {}
Word.connection.select_all(sql).each {|rowhash|
@word_counts[rowhash[‘word’]] = rowhash[‘count’]}

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

4

Rob B. wrote:

On Dec 18, 2008, at 4:40 PM, P�l Bergstr�m wrote:

Then you can process the @word_counts hash however you like.

sql = <<-END
SELECT words.word, count(publicsurveys.id) as ‘count’
FROM words LEFT OUTER JOIN publicsurveys ON publicsurvey.word =
words.word
GROUP BY words.word
END

@word_counts = {}
Word.connection.select_all(sql).each {|rowhash|
@word_counts[rowhash[‘word’]] = rowhash[‘count’]}

Perfect :slight_smile: