Question

I have the following in my tags controller (params[:q] comes from this plugin: http://loopj.com/jquery-tokeninput/). This is basically a slightly modified product of this screencast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/258-token-fields.

tags_controller.rb:

class TagsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @tags = Tag.where("name like ?", "%#{params[:q]}%")
    results = @tags.map(&:attributes)
    results << {:name => "Add: #{params[:q]}", :id => "CREATE_#{params[:q]}_END"}

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.json { render :json => results }
    end
  end

I want to only do results << {:name => "Add: #{params[:q]}", :id => "CREATE_#{params[:q]}_END"} only if the name doesn’t exist already in @tags. Because right now, it looks like this:

programming #input field

programming #drop-down menu

Add: progamming #drop-down menu

I want it to just display like

programming #input field

Add: progamming #drop-down menu

How to accomplish that?

EDIT:

Here is the model and JavaScript just in case:

application.js

$(function() {
  $("#post_tag_tokens").tokenInput("/tags.json", {
    crossDomain: false,
    prePopulate: $("#post_tag_tokens").data("pre"),
    preventDuplicates: true,
    theme: "facebook"
  });
});

post.rb:

   def tag_tokens=(ids)
    ids.gsub!(/CREATE_(.+?)_END/) do
      Tag.find_or_create_by_name(:name => $1).id
    end
    self.tag_ids = ids.split(",")
   end

Answer 1

You can do this:

 @tag = Tag.find_by_name(params[:q])

or

 @tag = Tag.name_like(params[:q])   #For this you need to install gem [searchlogic][1]

 if @tag.blank?
   # Do you things
 end