ActiveRecord find starts with

Question

Really simple question - how do I do a search to find all records where the name starts with a certain string in ActiveRecord. I\'ve seen all sorts of bits all over the internet

Answer 1

If you're looking to do the search in the database then you'll need to use SQL.

And, of course, you'll need to do the search in the database otherwise you need to load all the objects into Ruby (which isn't a good thing).

So, you will need something like

MyModel.find(:all, :conditions => ["field LIKE ?", "#{prefix}%"])

where prefix is a variable with the string you're looking for.

In Rails 3.0+ this becomes:

MyModel.where("field LIKE :prefix", prefix: "#{prefix}%")