Why modifiers are necessary?

ActiveRecord does a great job when it comes to keeping your code database agnostic. But I feel like it neglected searching when it came to that goal. What if you want to find all records that were created after 7am? Depending on your database you would have to do something like the following:

MySQL:        HOUR(created_at)
PostgreSQL:   date_part('hour', created_at)
SQLite:       strftime('%H', created_at)

All of a sudden your app is not database agnostic. Oh no!

All of that bragging to your girlfriend about how you can switch databases in a matter of minutes was all a lie. How’s she going to feel when she finds out HOUR(created_at) is a MySQL specific function? Searchlogic to the rescue!

Searchlogic modifiers

Remember how you can do this in searchlogic?

User.all(:condition => {:created_at_gt => Time.parse("Jan 1, 2008")})
# => "created_at > 2008-01-01 00:00:00

Now you can do this too:

User.all(:conditions => {:hour_of_created_at_gt => 10})
# => HOUR(created_at) > 10

or this:

User.all(:conditions => {:tan_of_sin_of_cos_of_minute_of_created_at_gt => 20})
# => TAN(SIN(COS(MINUTE(created_at)))) > 20

What the hell was that? That was me making the point that you can chain modifiers. Obviously a very unrealistic example, but cool none-the-less.

Check out the readme for a list of modifiers and check out the changelog for a complete list of changes

What do you think?