Rails - Nov 2006 - submitting only populated attributes from a form?

I have a form where a user can perform a search on many attributes. This 
is fine as long as the user specifies each attribute. But if one is left 
blank then the submit blows up. Actually it''s the find method in the 
controller that blows up. Is there a way to submit a form where only the 
populated attributes are send to the controller? If this is not possible 
I''ll have to put some default value for each attribute, like Null. Is 
there a way in the find condition to ignore these?

Here is the conditions part of my controller code.
person.find (:all, :conditions => ["family = :family and gender = 
:gender and etc. etc.", params])

-Anthony

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Anthony Walsh wrote:
> I have a form where a user can perform a search on many attributes. This 
> is fine as long as the user specifies each attribute. But if one is left 
> blank then the submit blows up. Actually it''s the find method in
the
> controller that blows up. Is there a way to submit a form where only the 
> populated attributes are send to the controller? If this is not possible 
> I''ll have to put some default value for each attribute, like Null.
Is
> there a way in the find condition to ignore these?
> 
> Here is the conditions part of my controller code.
> person.find (:all, :conditions => ["family = :family and gender = 
> :gender and etc. etc.", params])
> 
> -Anthony
You can''t prevent the browser form sending all form fields.  The right 
way to do this is make sure you are only searching on fields that the 
user filled in by stripping the bad ones out first.

Here''s how I would do it:

  def search
    #define a list of fields that are searchable
    search_fields = [
      :family,
      :name,
      :gender,
    ]

    #remove fields form the list which were not filled in by user
    search_fields.reject! do |field|
      params[field].nil? || params[field].empty?
    end

    #generate array of condition fragments for the leftover fields
    conditions = search_fields.collect do |field|
      "#{field} = :#{field}"
    end

    #join array with AND resulting in a string
    conditions = conditions.join('' AND '')

    #do find
    @people = Peron.find(:all, :conditions => [conditions, params])
  end

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Alex Wayne wrote:
> 
> You can''t prevent the browser form sending all form fields.  The
right
> way to do this is make sure you are only searching on fields that the 
> user filled in by stripping the bad ones out first.
> 
That works! Thanks for the help.

-Anthony

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