Question

I have an app that lists a bands shows in an unordered list on the home page.

<ul>
 <% for show in @shows %>
   <li>
     <strong><%= link_to show.venue, show %></strong><br />
     <%= display_date(show.show_date) %>
   </li>
 <% end %>
</ul>

There is a shows controller that handles creating the shows. It has rows in the database like venue, show_date, show_time, and so on. The home page of the app comes from a pages controller. The pages controller has two actions that create the home page and the about page.

class PagesController < ApplicationController 
  def home
    @shows = Show.find(:all, :order => :show_date)
  end

  def about
  end
end

The problem I’m having is that I only want the shows with a show_date greater than or equal to Date.today to be populated into the @shows instance variable that will in turn be populated into the unordered list. Any help writing a custom finder method would be greatly appreciated. Would it be easier to filter through the @shows variable using a helper method?

Answer 1

Here’s how to filter out dates (this uses Rails 3’s newer where(...) syntax instead of find(:all...)).

@shows = Show.where("show_date >= ?", Date.today).order(:show_date)

Also, in your Show model you could add a named scope so you can reuse this in other places:

class Show < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :upcoming, lambda { where("show_date >= ?", Date.today).order(:show_date) }
end

Then in your controller, you could just do:

@shows = Show.upcoming