Question

I’m very familiar with using hash arguments to ActiveRecord queries, such as:

SomeModel.where(association_id: something.id, status: ACTIVE_STATUSES).exists?

and similar. But what if you want to do a simple NOT EQUAL or != or <> type condition? My simple case is just to exclude the current object from the query.

The only way I can think of would be this:

SomeModel.where("id != ?", self.id).where(association_id: something.id,...)

But this seems not very rails-like.

Is there a simpler way, or a way to include the != in the hash conditions?

Answer 1

You can either drop to the Arel table.
There is a great (pro) Railscast on Arel.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/355-hacking-with-arel

You could also use the Squeel gem.

http://erniemiller.org/projects/squeel/

http://railscasts.com/episodes/354-squeel

In Squeel:

SomeModel.where{ id != my_id }