Question

Hi am combining a simple search facility with will_paginate pagination, based on the respective and excellent RailsCasts tutorials.

The code (in the model) is shown below,

def search(search, page)

  # See RailsCasts #37 Simple Search Form & #51 will_paginate

  if search
    @matches = SalesActivity.where('salespeople.name LIKE ? OR products.name LIKE ?',
                                      "%#{search}%", "%#{search}%")

    @matches.paginate :per_page => 30,
                      :page => page,
                      :order => 'created_at DESC' # <--- causes exception
  else
    paginate :include => [:salesperson, :product],
             :order => 'created_at DESC',  # works 
             :per_page => 30,
             :page => page
  end
end

The ordering specified works fine in the paginate request on the path without the search.

However, on the path that use the search result (@matches), I get the following error,

SQLite3::SQLException: ambiguous column name: created_at: SELECT ...  ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 30 OFFSET 

If I remove the order parameter, it works fine.

I’d appreciate suggestions for how to fix this. Thanks.

Answer 1

The fix here was to add ‘all’ to the end of the ‘where’ request, to initiate the actually query to load the data, as per Active Record Query protocol.

@matches = SalesActivity.where('salespeople.name LIKE ? OR products.name LIKE ?',
                                  "%#{search}%", "%#{search}%").all