We have plans to release several plugins to the open source community. PopCrit is the first of these. PopCrit grew out of our need to create rails conditions dynamically at run-time, usually coupled with a form like the one below.
To cope with creating rails conditions, I’m sure you’ve had to do or seen this done before:
1 2 3 4 | if @f_name.to_s.length != 0 crit += " AND first_name like ?" crit_values += ["#{@f_name}%"] end |
Multiply that by 10 fields in a robust dynamic query form and your code begins to smell. We hate it too, so we created the PopCrit plugin (previously a simple library in our applications) to manage those nasty dynamic queries users love so much.
With the PopCrit plugin, you can simply use the new process_criteria_params method provided. It will take your forms parameters and convert it into Rails loving conditions. Now you just have to do the following:
@cards = Infocard.find(:all, :conditions=>process_criteria_params(params[:dynamic]))
There’s more to it, so feel free to check out our repository at http://github.com/chazlett/popcrit/tree/master.
Or install it, play around, and feel free to contribute.
script/plugin install git://github.com/chazlett/popcrit.git
-Chris
Tags: Open Source, Rails Plugin, Ruby on Rails
