Question

I am fairly new to RoR and hacking on a small application. In order to display existing values of some model column in a form, I currently do:

<% form_for([@testbox, @testitem]) do |f| %>
  <%= f.label :sortkey %><br />
  <%= f.collection_select :sortkey, Testitem.groups , :sortkey, :sortkey, {:include_blank => true}  %>
<% end %>

In the model Testitem I have:

def Testitem.groups
  return find_by_sql("SELECT DISTINCT sortkey from testitems; ")
end

I am sure there is a more elegant solution to this? I have tried find(:all).sortkey.unique but that throws undefined method 'sortkey' for #<Array:0x59d1b60>

Answer 1

This accomplishes the same thing but I’m not sure it’s any more elegant:

Testitem.find(:all, :select => "DISTINCT sortkey")