Rails - Mar 2006 - using components

Hi
I''m trying make a sidebar, and the view of the sidebar are components,
ala Typo but with a variant.

I made a Distributors components that render a select width a list of
states(province in my country) and onchange of the select I fire a
search of the distributors for that state.

The things is I want use the find method in the component but I can''t
from an url.

can this be done?

Thanks
Hern?n