Hi everyone,

I'm at the end of my rope on this.  I can't get pagination to work
with anything but a standard find on a model.  If I try to do a search
and customize the pagination, I get lots of different variations.

My thought was to have the list action do what it does, but to pass it
a list of search conditions from the search action.  So, if search
determines that we need to get a list of all people in X department,
it sets up searchconditions and tries to pass it to list.  No luck
there.

My basic question is, what's the best practice way to paginate over
custom finds?  The search results usually come up ok, it's just that
the pagination links don't pass on the right parameters, so they
either don't work, or they just go back to the regular list, even
though the action is search (in the URL).

The most recent attempt has normal listings working correctly, but
when I perform a search (which displays correctly) and click on any of
the pagination links, since there's no passing of the search
variables.

I know how to do this, as I've done it a million times in other
projects, but I can't find the Rails way to do this that makes me say,
"Oh, magic!"  And, since I'm using rails, I'd rather not go and build
this the way I would have in Perl.

I'm sorry if I come off as harsh, but I'm incredibly frustrated by
this.  I've been hacking on it for hours now, and I can't launch this
version of my app without proper pagination.  The deadline is today,
and I figured this would be a lot easier than it seems to be.

Code:
Controller:
  def list
    @person_pages, @people = paginate :person, :order => 'last_name
ASC', :per_page => 20
  end

  def search
    searchconditions = []
    if params.include?(:letter)
      searchconditions = ["LOWER(last_name) LIKE ?",
params[:letter].to_str + "%"]
    elsif params.include?(:department)
      searchconditions = ["department_id = ?", params[:department]]
    elsif session[:q]
      if params[:q]
        session[:q] = params[:q].downcase
        searchconditions = [ "LOWER(username) LIKE ? OR
LOWER(first_name) LIKE ? OR LOWER(last_name) LIKE ? OR
LOWER(preferred_name) LIKE ?",
                       "%" + session[:q] + "%",
                       "%" + session[:q] + "%",
                       "%" + session[:q] + "%",
                       "%" + session[:q] + "%" ]
      end
    else
      session[:q] = ''
    end
    if searchconditions.empty?
      flash[:note] = "You must enter a search phrase to search."
      redirect_to :action => "list"
    else
      @person_pages, @people = paginate :person, :per_page => 20,
        :conditions => searchconditions, :order => 'last_name ASC'
      render :action => "list"
    end
  end

View:
<%= link_to "Previous", { :page =>
@person_pages.current.previous } if
@person_pages.current.previous -%>
<% pagination_links_each(@person_pages, :window_size => 4) do |n| %>
    <a href='?page=<%= n %>'><%= n %></a>
<% end %>
<%= link_to "Next", { :page => @person_pages.current.next } if
@person_pages.current.next -%>

Resources I've used to (it seems) no avail:

http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionController/Pagination.html
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowtoPagination
http://bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/389
http://railsexpress.de/blog/articles/2005/11/04/faster-pagination