Prune blank conditions from the low-level c: API

[scarroll32]

Note

This PR was opened by Claude (Claude Code), acting on behalf of @scarroll32.
It builds on @gdott9's #1653 — thank you for finding this.

Closes #1653.

The bug

Search#initialize drops conditions whose value is blank, but it only inspects top-level values. The c: API nests its values a level deeper, so they were never seen. The condition then built its attribute and contributed a join, producing a query with a LEFT OUTER JOIN and no WHERE clause — different behaviour from the equivalent shorthand:

Person.ransack(children_name_eq: '').result.to_sql
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people"

Person.ransack(c: { '0' => { a: ['children_name'], p: 'eq', v: [''] } }).result.to_sql
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people" LEFT OUTER JOIN "people" "children_people" ON ...

Three changes to @gdott9's version

1. The Hash form of v: was dropped unconditionally. This is the important one. The original guard read:

value[:v].all? { |_, i| value[:value].blank? && value[:value] != false }

value there is the enclosing condition hash ({a:, p:, v:}), so value[:value] is always nil — always blank, never false. Every Hash-form value was therefore pruned regardless of content. Verified against the branch as submitted:

Person.ransack(c: { '0' => { a: ['name'], p: 'eq', v: { '0' => { value: 'Ernie' } } } }).result.to_sql
# => SELECT "people".* FROM "people" ORDER BY "people"."id" DESC
#    the condition is silently gone

A search that quietly returns every row is a worse failure than the one being fixed — that's an unfiltered result set going somewhere a filtered one was intended. The value is now unwrapped from either the bare or { value: ... } envelope form before being tested, matching the two shapes Condition#values= already accepts.

2. String keys were missed. params has not been through with_indifferent_access at that point in initialize, so params.key?(:c) doesn't match the "c" that arrives from an HTTP query string — the main way this API is used. Both spellings are handled.

3. The blank test is factored out into blank_condition_value?, shared by the top-level filter and the c: filter, so the two cannot drift. That also preserves the !i.nil? clause added in #1657, which the original overwrote — without it, name_in: [nil] would have regressed.

Tests

@gdott9's spec, plus three guarding the above:

• blank values pruned from a string-keyed c: hash
• a populated Hash-form value survives (fails on the original branch)
• a populated Array-form value survives

Full suite: 533 examples, 0 failures, 1 pending (Rails 8.1.3 / Ruby 3.4.9 / SQLite). RuboCop clean — the two Layout/SpaceAfterComma offences that were failing build on #1653 are gone.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[Copilot]

Copilot review overview

🟡 Changes recommended

The implementation mutates caller input and misses blank conditions inside nested groupings.

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Review effort: Balanced
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Open (1)

• Recursively prune blank conditions in nested groupings · New

What changed in this PR

Prunes blank values from low-level advanced-search conditions to avoid unnecessary joins.

Changes:

• Adds blank-condition pruning for symbol- and string-keyed c parameters.
• Preserves populated array and hash-form values.
• Adds regression coverage for these cases.

File	Description
lib/​ransack/​search.rb	Adds advanced-condition pruning helpers.
spec/​ransack/​adapters/​active_record/​base_spec.rb	Adds pruning and value-preservation tests.

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[scarroll32]

Note

Reply from Claude (Claude Code), acting on behalf of @scarroll32.

Agreed. Fixed in 948b14c: the pruning now recurses through g/groupings at every depth (Array or index-keyed Hash) and prunes c/conditions in each. While doing that I found the params were only shallow-duplicated, so the in-place delete_if was editing the caller's nested hash — they are now deep_duped first. Specs cover single, double and long-form nesting, plus a snapshot check that the input comes back unchanged.