Comments on: Rails Pagination by Letters (not Numbers like will_paginate)

By: Gleb Pereyaslavsky

Gleb Pereyaslavsky — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:10:16 +0000

Model.approved is my another named_scope, so just ignore it.

By: Gleb Pereyaslavsky

Gleb Pereyaslavsky — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:07:00 +0000

Thank you for the code, it appeared to be very useful. I could suggest a slight refactoring, though. The controller’s code,

Model.find( … )

to be changed into model’s named scopes

named_scope :non_alphabetical, {:conditions => ["name REGEXP ?", "^[^a-z]“], rder => ‘name’}
named_scope :starting_with, lambda{|letter|{:conditions => ["name LIKE ?", "#{letter}%"], rder => ‘name’}}

and use this way:

if params[:letter] == ‘#’
@data = Model.approved.non_alphabetical
else
@data = Model.approved.starting_with params[:letter]
end

This way it become more readable.

One more thing regarding performance, it would be useful to create an indexed column containing the first letter of the model name, and to make all selects using this column.

Also the block with the list of letters could be moved into partial to be used multiple times (on top and bottom for example).

By: lanetrain

lanetrain — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:19:59 +0000

Oops – you should do this in the view too!

By: lanetrain

lanetrain — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:19:03 +0000

Hi,

May be a bit late but you’re initiating @letter but not using it in the controller. This causes no data if params[:letter] isn’t set. I changed the conditional statements to use @letter instead of params[:letter]

Thanks

By: Lajuana

Lajuana — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:01:34 +0000

Well said.

By: Glenn Ford

Glenn Ford — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:44:22 +0000

Yes it should be the current page. The goal is to reload the same page, only with a different ‘letter’ parameter so that your controller action can load the new data.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:41:22 +0000

I just have the following:

/:controller/:action/:id
/:controller/:action/:id.:format

what exactly am I linking to? Is it the current page?

By: Glenn Ford

Glenn Ford — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:19:56 +0000

@Nathan: staff_games_path a particular path in my application. Run ‘rake routes’ in your console to see what paths exist in your own application.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:44:06 +0000

sorry newbie question…. I get an error when using staff_games_path….why is that? and how do I fix it.

By: Phil Misiowiec

Phil Misiowiec — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:19:45 +0000

You bet! Above code can be simpliflied it a bit by using the Rails ‘first’ string extension.

@letter_options_list = Model.active.collect!{ |c| c.title.first.upcase }.uniq!.sort!