What's the best way to search by date in Rails?

Question

HI

whats the best way to implement a simple search in rails to retrieve all models with the same date?

e.g retrieve all customer with birthday date on 23-10-1975, which will be of a date format.

i.e

  create_table "customer", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "f_name"
    t.string   "m_name"
    t.string   "l_name"
    t.date     "date_of_birth" 
end

Answer 1

I presume you want to congratulate all users that have their birthday today? Well, I'm not on a dev-machine now, so I can't test it, but I would go for something like this:

@bday_customers = Customer.find(:all, :conditions => { :birthday => Date.today } )

or even

@bday_customers = Customer.find(:all, :conditions => { :birthday => (Date.today)..(Date.today + 2.weeks) } )

This will cause your database to do the work as it its optimised for such searches.

Answer 2

Assuming date is a string of the form 23-10-1975 then something like this;

Customer.all(:conditions => { :date_of_birth => Date.strptime(date, '%d-%m-%Y') })