Ellipsis

I’m finally plugging away at at my first wholly-owned Rails application. It be late, so I’ll just briefly note that one can do SQL LIKE statements with MySQL semi-safely with the following snippet:

find(  :all, 
         :conditions => ["description RLIKE ?", '.*' + description + '.*'] )

while gets translated into the following SQL:

SELECT * FROM waypoints WHERE (description RLIKE '.*Illinois.*') 

I’ve not yet read the security chapter for AWDwR, so I don’t know whether this is recommended or not

Note to self: Shouldn’t this be on the Rails Wiki?

_

Also, I keep getting caught with ‘You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it! You might have expected an instance of Array’, even when I was checking if an object was Nil or not. Now I’ve learned that checks like this won’t work:

if params[:waypoint][:stop].nil?
     @waypoints = []
end

because they were evaluating to something like nil[:stop].nil?, which don’t fly. I now have code that does this, but it’s ugly, so I need to ask around about what the proper way to do this is.

if params.nil? || params[:waypoint].nil?
     @waypoints = []
end