Question

I would like my website to allow users to select a product category such as ‘books’ and return the results that are in that category. The code I’m using is from Railscast #228 Sortable Table Columns.

How do I change the code to look for a specific string in the category column?

Controller:

class ProductsController < ApplicationController
 helper_method :sort_column, :sort_direction

 def sort_column
  Product.column_names.include?(params[:sort]) ? params[:sort] : "name"
 end

 def sort_direction
  %w[asc desc].include?(params[:direction]) ? params[:direction] : "asc"
 end
end

Helper function:

def sortable(column, title = nil)
 title ||= column.titleize
 css_class = column == sort_column ? "current #{sort_direction}" : nil
 direction = column == sort_column && sort_direction == "asc" ? "desc" : "asc"
 link_to title, {:sort => column, :direction => direction}, {:class => css_class}
end

HTML:

<tr>
<th><%= sortable "name" %></th>
<th><%= sortable "price" %></th>
<th><%= sortable "released_at", "Released" %></th>
</tr>

Answer 1

Figured it out, it was actually pretty easy, created a new function and instead of using strings (which was not working) I used id #s and then plugged in ‘sort_category’ into my Solr function for search.

def sort_category
params[:category] ? params[:category] : 1..12
end