Rails 3 finding a record based on non-key attribute

Question

• I have a model called "Notes".
• The attributes are "id", "url", "content".
• In my notes_controller want to retrieve the "id" of a particular note where the "url" matches my query url.

I am using the following:

    @noteid = Note.find(:url => "blah").id

However, this returns the error: Unknown key(s): url

is there a way to find a record based on non-key attributes?

Answer 1

Try @noteid = Note.where(:url => "blah").select('id').id