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Squirrel - Once More, with Feeling!

I admit, the first iteration of Squirrel wasn’t really as super fabulous as I thought it would be. Because of how I was using the blocks, you couldn’t do a simple thing like access params. And since half the fun of it was being able to make good looking, flexible queries, not being able to use params was a giant pain.

Now, however, I’ve managed to mix the clean, functional look of instance_eval with the husky utilitarianism of params to come up with a happier, shinier Squirrel:

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users = User.find(:all) do
  blog.title == params[:blog_name]
end

And what’s that in the trees, gracefully swinging from vine to vine? It’s our friends any and all here to give us grouping blocks!

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site = Site.find(:first) do
  any {
    domains.hostname == params[:hostname]
    domains.hostname == "www.#{params[:hostname]}"
  }
end

All the functions you’d expect to be able to use in your controller are available (well, as long as you actually are in your controller, anyway; squirrels aren’t miracle workers)—params, session, etc.

You can use the unary minus to negate any condition or block, and you can also use it to do a descending order_by

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Post.find(:all) do
  -any {
    title =~ /^OMG/
    id == 4
  }
  order_by -created_on
end

This is a major rewrite from the original code and cleaned up things in a very good way. And what’s more, we’re using it in real code now, so I have a fire under my ass to keep it in fighting shape.

The SVN repo is https://svn.thoughtbot.com/plugins/squirrel/trunk for all of you itching to try it out.

About this entry

You're reading an entry on GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS, the company weblog of thoughtbot, inc.

Author:
Jon Yurek
Published:
January 12th 02:28 PM
Updated:
March 25th 08:48 PM
Sections:
Development

 

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We built Shoulda, an eclectic set of additions to Test::Unit; Paperclip to manage uploaded files without hassle; Jester, a REST/ActiveResource client library written in Javascript, and Squirrel, an enhancement for ActiveRecord's find syntax; — amongst some other projects.


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