Rails - May 2014 - Finding a record which I had created

I thought this is an easy one, but: I have created a record, and later
would like to retrieve it again.

Here is an excerpt of my schema:

 create_table "dicts", force: true do |t|
    t.string   "dictname"
    ...
  end

My model ensures that dictname is unique:

   validates   :dictname,
               presence: true,
               length: { minimum: 3 },
               format: { with: /\A\D/ },
               uniqueness: true

In my controller, I tried this to fetch a Dict object, when the value
for the :dictname field is stored in variable dict_name:

if Dict.exists?(:dictname => dict_name)
      logger.debug('found dictionary with name '+dict_name)
      dictid=Dict.where(:dictname => dict_name).select('id').first.id
      logger.debug('dictid='+dictid.inspect)
      @dict=Dict.find(dictid)

However, the line to calculate dictid fails with

   TypeError (can't cast Hash to integer)

which would suggest that the hash argument to the 'where' method is
unexpected. But this can't really be, can it?

So, my questions:

- Why do I get this error?

- How do I fix it?

- The whole procedure to get at my Dict record, looks unnecessarily
convoluted to me. Isn't there an easier way to do it?

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