I have often wished to add a trivial search capability to my controllers which would allow searching on different fields. Without getting into a mess of many different if statements each of which has a different set of conditions, I use something much like the following:
1 def index
2 cond_hash = {}
3 cond_strings = []
4
5 if params[:search]
6 cond_hash[:login] = "%#{params[:search]}%"
7 cond_hash[:email] = "%#{params[:search]}%"
8 cond_strings << "(login ILIKE :login OR email ILIKE :email)"
9 end
10 if params[:search_address]
11 cond_hash[:address] = params[:search_address]
12 cond_strings << "(address == :address)"
13 end
14
15 conditions = cond_strings.join(" AND ")
16 @users = User.all :conditions => [ conditions, cond_hash ]
17 end
It may be safer to use users.login, users.email, and users.address in the SQL-like strings above.