Question

So I am creating a ruby on rails application and in my view I have a list of link_to with each being a different console

In my database table I have a field called console.

What I want to do is when a user clicks on a link e.g. Playstation 3, it will return back all records that have Playstation 3 listed in that table column.

I was wondering how I would go about doing this, I have tried searching on the internet but have not found anything similar.

It is for a project that I don’t have long to complete. I was owndering what I would state in the link to’s in the view and what I would put in the games_controller.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

The basic gist is to have a controller action which will return the list of games filtering by console. For example,

# GamesController.rb
def index
   @games = Game.find_by_console(params[:console])
end

Then you can create a link for any particular console as such:

link_to 'XBOX', games_path(:console => 'XBOX')

This should result in a GET request to the URL /games?console=XBOX

If you’ve got a pre-defined set of consoles, you might look into making them into constants inside a Consoles module to avoid having to hardcode them everywhere.

UPDATE:

Since you are trying to implement both searching and filtering in the same chain, you need to make sure that find_by_console isn’t called if it’s not present.

# GamesController.rb
def index
   @games = Game.search(params[:search])
   @games = @games.find_by_console(params[:console]) unless params[:console].blank?
end