Checking if ActiveRecord find returns a result

Question

I'm trying to check if a find method returns a result. My find method is the following:

post = Post.find(:all, :conditions => { :url => params['url'] }, :limit => 1)

What would be a good way to check that post contains a result?

Answer 1

it may be as simple as changing your finder to:

post = Post.find(:first, :conditions => { :url => params['url'] })

With this finder, post will either return a single value or nil. Because nil behaves like false in a condition statement, you can say something like the following:

if post
  # do something
else
  # do something else
end