ruby - How to return an array of clients with include?

Question

A client has many different colored shirts: red, blue, pink etc. I want to pick out all clients with red shirts. How?

Shirts are stored like this:

c = Client.last
c.shirt #=> "red,blue,pink"

If the client had one colored shirt, I'd get the information like:

Client.where(shirt: "red")

But since a client will have many shirts, I need something like include?. The English would be: Give me all clients that has a red shirt. How do you write that?

c = Client.all
c.map do |m| m.shirt.include? "red" end #=> [0] true

I like to return an array of clients with red shirts.

Answer 1

You should be able to find it with:

Client.where('shirt like ?', "%#{color}%")

The percentage sign (%) matches anything. So you are looking for all the clients whose shirt colors match

<ANYTHING>red<ANYTHING>

Now this works as long as search terms do not include each other. So if you have following colors

• red
• darkred
• lightred

then searching for "%red%" will yield all three variants as result.

Depending on how you DB schema looks like and how many records you have, it might be easier if you have "ShirtColors" as separate entities and link them to clients.

UPDATE:

If you have cases as described above with "red", "darkred" and so on and you want to stick with the "short color as column" approach:

• Add separator before, between and after the colors: ",red,blue,darkred,"

• Search for:

  Client.where('shirt like ?', ",#{color},")