CriteriaQuery and arbitrary conditions

September 21st, 2006

CriteriaQuery is a Rails plugin which eases arbitrary query building.

From the README:

If you frequently face the problem of constructing complex dynamic queries, you will get some benefit out of this. Consider the following search form (taken from a real application): 
Name (first or last): [               ]
Customer Category:    [ Please Select ][^]
Last call between:    [         ] and [         ]
Active Contacts only: [x]
Address
State:                [               ]
City:                 [               ]          
Street Addres:        [               ]

…

CriteriaQuery allows you to write the above as:

This is all fine and dandy, except using the current version (r41 from the repository), you cannot add arbitrary conditions, such as LENGTH(name) > 0.

ActiveRecord scopes to the rescue. I recently hit that in an application where we allow the admin to find only non anonymous estimates. Non anonymous is defined as having either a phone or an E-Mail address.

Of course, you will ask “why in the world aren’t your fields NULL to begin with if they don’t contain a value ?” Now, that is a very interesting question which I will now explore with gusto !

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I am François Beausoleil, a Ruby on Rails coder. During the day, I work on XLsuite. At night, I am interested many things. Read my biography

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