Question

I am trying to use the following sql statement in a Rails application with Rails query helper methods. The result of this sql in the original (non-Rails) application is to do a fuzzy search on someone’s name with any letter. For example, if you enter an “a” in the search box, it will return everyone name that has the letter “a” in it somewhere. “Marissa Jones” and “Andrea Barfs” would both be matches.

      "select e.id, e.firstName, e.lastName, e.title " .
      "from employee e left join employee r on r.managerId = e.id " .
      "WHERE UPPER(CONCAT(e.firstName, ' ', e.lastName)) LIKE :name " .
      "group by e.id order by e.lastName, e.firstName";

I tried to translate that sql statement using some of Rails active record query interface helper methods. (I didn’t attempt to include the ‘join’ from the above sql because it didn’t seem necessary for the fuzzy search or for the purposes of my app). There is one user supplied parameter :query

employees_controller.rb

respond_to :json
 ...
def getEmployeesByName

    query = Employee.select("id, firstname, lastname, title")
    q = "%#{params[:query]}%"
    query.where("UPPER(CONCAT(firstName, ' ', lastName)) LIKE ?", q).to_sql
    query.group("id")
    query.order("lastname", "firstname")

    respond_with query.all 

end 

When I try my code, it’s returning all of the 5 employees in the database, even if they don’t have the letter “a” in their name. This is the sql shown in the server, when, for example, I enter an “a” in the search box.

  Processing by EmployeesController#getEmployeesByName as JSON
  Parameters: {"query"=>"a"}
  Employee Load (0.1ms)  SELECT id, firstname, lastname, title FROM "employees" 

So it seems the last four lines of my action are being ignored

    query.where("UPPER(CONCAT(firstName, ' ', lastName)) LIKE ?", q).to_sql
    query.group("id")
    query.order("lastname", "firstname")
    respond_with query.all 

Can anyone explain what I’m doing wrong. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

query is being assigned an instance of Employee by the first line. You are then calling where, group, and order on the class Employee via the instance, but ignoring the result in every case. Finally, you are calling Employee.all via the instance, and inspecting the result, which correctly includes all records.
Try something like:

respond_with Employee.where("UPPER(CONCAT(firstName, ' ', lastName)) LIKE ?", q).group("id").order("lastname", "firstname")