Ruby on Rails

Thanks Dave.

Maybe I expressed myself a bit unclearly. I'm not trying to reinvent SQL or create a new database implementation, that's insane! The API I'm building is RESTful of course. I don't have a problem of querying models per se, that's done with RESTful routing as it should be done. What I'm after is a way to do more complex filtering of the result set using query parameters than what ActiveRecord now supports.

As of now a request like this


works fine since I can filter the query parameters through params.permit and throw them into User.where(params) or something to that effect.

However, the ActiveRecord Query Interface doesn't have that elaborate support for hash conditions, as stated in the docs

Only equality, range and subset checking are possible with Hash conditions.

which translates to only using AND, IN and =. Hence, I'm looking for a way to enhance the built in support for simple conditions to support something similar to what I described above, particularly a way to combine AND and OR filtering.

Sure, I could parse the query parameters and use the different parts to build a query using ActiveRecord's other condition methods or by using Arel or some of the other tools I mentioned, but that's just it: nothing I've come across so far supports this kind of "advanced" filtering by passing the filter condition straight from the query parameters to the .where() method. It doesn't seem so far fetched since ActiveRecord already offers support for simple filtering using hashes and all ORM tools I've looked at supports it on a programmatic level.

So what I'm asking is if anyone knows whether something like this exists, or ideas on implementation strategies if I end up doing it myself.



On Monday, March 30, 2015 at 9:57:01 PM UTC+3, Dave Aronson wrote:

Other pointers: don't do that.  Don't reinvent SQL and something to
implement it as well.  There are reasons not everybody has written a
complete database.  Plus, it will be a maintenance *and security*
nightmare.

Look instead at the REST standards.  Yes, there's some ambiguity...
but pick what works, for you, *simply*.

--
Dave Aronson, consulting software developer of Codosaur.us,
PullRequestRoulette.com, Blog.Codosaur.us, and Dare2XL.com.