Rails gem Ransack -> search 'or condition' with 'is null' and a specific value (field=x OR field IS NULL)

Question

I made a support ticket system for our supporters - programmed with ruby on rails (Ruby 1.9.3 Rails 3.2)

There is a ticket model with a belongs_to association to users (supporter).

I use Ernie's gem Ransack for searching. When the supporter searches his own tickets (handled by tickets_controller.index) he should also see the unassociated tickets in the search result (views/tickets/index) (in combination with the other serach conditions eg. "date" or something else)

(So that he can take an open ticket)

expected SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE ... AND (user_id=5 OR user_id IS NULL) AND ... 

I tried user_id_null_or_user_id_eq in the search form of the index-view - but that does not work (no method error)

How can I make a custom predicate (or ransacker) to solve this problem? (Thanks @Magnuss for this comment)

Unfortunately, I have no experience with Arel

Something like:

ransacker :user_null_or_eq do
    ...
end

in the tickets model.

I hope this explains the problem in more detail.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I also had to figure this out and @TomG answer helped a lot! You really don't need to create a ransacker for this issue, it an be fixed by using the build_grouping method of ransack (that is not documented anywhere...) and put in the condition you need with 'or' condition.

I used it to search items to add to a cage but wanted to show the user only items that are not already in my cage (and also not assigned to any other cage), so in my controller:

   @search = Cage.ransack(params[:q])
   @search.build_grouping({:m => 'or', :storage_id_not_eq => @cage_item.id, :storage_id_null => true})  
   @results_count = @search.result(:distinct => true).length
   @items = @search.result(:distinct => true).paginate(:per_page => 20, :page => params[:page] || 1)

   @search.build_condition if @search.conditions.empty?
   @search.build_sort if @search.sorts.empty?

So when I'm printing the query ransack is running it will show:

 @search.result.to_sql
"SELECT `specimens`.* FROM `specimens`  WHERE (`specimens`.`deleted_at` IS NULL) AND ((`specimens`.`storage_id` != 183 OR `specimens`.`storage_id` IS NULL))"

and if I add a name query:

@search.result.to_sql
"SELECT `specimens`.* FROM `specimens`  WHERE (`specimens`.`deleted_at` IS NULL) AND ((`specimens`.`name` LIKE '%root%' AND (`specimens`.`storage_id` != 183 OR `specimens`.`storage_id` IS NULL)))"

Hope this helps you or someone else with having trouble using OR in ransack conditions instead of the basic AND.