Conditional where in rails

T.L.D.R

You can pass blank object to where clause and it will return current relation as it is.

Long version

Sometimes, we need to apply where clause conditionally. For eg. apply timeframe condition if timeframe is given in params. We can achieve this using simple if/unless.

  def most_recent(from = nil, to = Date.today)
    condition = Activity.where("created_at < ?", to)
    condition.where("created_at > ?", from) unless from.blank?
  end

This works but doesn’t look good. If we can chain this second conditional scope, it would be much better. Enter magic of Rails. If we read documentation of whereclause,

# === blank condition
    #
    # If the condition is any blank-ish object, then #where is a no-op and returns
    # the current relation.

This is interesting. This means if we pass any blank value to where clause, it returns the current relation as it is.

Now we have to just write a method which will generate the query if condition is satisfied. It will return nil otherwise resulting in a no-op.

  def most_recent(from = nil, to = Date.today)
    Activity.where("created_at < ?", to).where(from_condition(from))
  end

  def from_condition(from)
    "created_at > #{from}" unless from.blank?
  end

This looks more cleaner than earlier solution. It will work the same way if we pass '', "", {}, [], false or any other object that respond to blank as true instead of nil.

Happy Hacking!