Understanding Rails: index action- how to return none when no search param present?

I have a very basic index action that accepts a search param. And it works...

  def index
    if params[:search]
      @reports = Report.where("title LIKE ?", "%#{params[:search]}%")
    else
      @reports = Report.all
    end
  end

But, it shows ALL records when there is no se开发者_运维技巧arch parameter...where i'd like it to show none. Tried setting @reports = nil but that threw an error.

What's the proper way to do this?

Update: adding error message per request:

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.each
Extracted source (around line #16):

13:     <th>File Type</th>
14:     <th>Title</th>
15:   </tr>
16:   <% for report in @reports %>
17:     <tr>
18:       <td><%= report.serial %></td>
19:       <td><%= report.file_kind %></td>

---

If you want @reports to be an array you could do :

@reports = params[:search].present?? Report.where("title LIKE ?", "%#{params[:search]}%").all : []

If you want to be uber-clever but not super db efficient this gives you @reports as an ActiveRelation

@reports = Report.where(params[:search].present?? ["title like ?", "%#{params[:search]}%"] : "id < 0")

But really, the controller isn't the offending portion here. When @reports is nil where does the error come from? Most likely you should do

def index
  @reports = Report.where("title LIKE ?", "%#{params[:search]}%") if params[:search].present?
end

and then make sure the rest of your action can handle a nil @reports gracefully.

---

There is nothing wrong with setting the @reports variable to nil. I suspect that the error is thrown from either an after filter or the view itself, where you probably have some code that doesn't expect @reports to be nil. What error are you getting?

---

Jesse suggestion is correct. But, it still shows the error on your view page. So, you just add the if condition at the end for end section.

... <% end if @reports != nil %>