ROR request an action to get a range of items

Question

How would I create an action that takes in parameters to limit search results? This would be out of my Posts model

Posts_controller:

def getOneThrougTen

params[firstNum] params[secondNum]

return range of some sort?

end

Answer 1

It's not entirely clear to me what you want to achieve, but if it is displaying search results in chunks, I'll advice you to use the will_paginate gem!

Answer 2

Once you learn the basics of how active record mimics sql calls passing the parameters becomes intuitive. For example this is how you would create a collection of @posts from your Post model based on a range from a particular column, order the results and limit the number returned.

You can watch the script/server output to see the actual SQL to help understand what is going on and why something doesn't go as planned.

@posts=Post.find(:all, :conditions=>["db_column_name between ? and ?", firstNum, secondNum],:order=>"db_column_name ASC", :limit=>10)

To actually send and read your params.. In your controller you can read params sent by the view and assign them to variables. For example you could do.

 def getDateRangeandPassItOn
     firstNum=params[:firstNum] 
     ...

To actually send them from the view to your controller is different depending on if you are using a fully restful controller such as the one generated in rails scaffoldind. If all you want is to send them into a non restful method such as "getDateRangeandPassItOn" you would do something like this in your view.

<% form_for ({:controller => 'name', :action => "getDateRangeandPassItOn"}) do f%>    
<%f.label :firstNum%> 
<%f.textField :firstNum%>
<%f.submit "submit"%>
<%end%> 

Answer 3

If you're looking for pagination type code, you should look at the new capabilities provided with Arel and ActiveRecord in Rails 3. That will allow you to do the following:

@posts = Post.all.limit(myLimit).offset(myOffset)

or

@posts = Post.where(["user_id = ?",myUserId]).limit(myLimit).offset(myOffset).order("created_at desc")

etc. etc. Very powerful stuff.