title: Filtering displayed records by form input
body: <p>I'm super new to programming and am stuck... again,</p>
  
  <p>I'm using rails 3 and currently have a venue model where each venue belongs to an area and a type (which are each thier own models) all of the venues in the database are displayed at the index page in partitions displaying the venue name, and its area and type.  </p>
  
  <p>How can I go about having a form with 2 dropdowns (areas and types) on the index page which filter the venue records shown depending on what is selected in the dropdowns. e.g. select pubs as type and Manchester as area and only the pubs in Manchester are shown or select pubs as type and all as area and all the pubs from all areas are shown. </p>
  
  <p>I have tried installing sphinx and thinking_sphinx but can't seem to get them working on my windows 7. I got as far as a 1067 error on service startup and a "Failed to start searchd daemon." from thinking_sphinx on rake ts:start, which im presuming is from the sevice not running, so I'm hoping the answer to this won't involve sphinx.</p>
  
  <p>I've had a look at scopes and am thinking this could possibly be the way to go? Although I haven't got the first idea as to how to include a dropdown to select the scope needed or indeed how to write a scope which will satisfy the kind of filter I want.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks very much for any help, its much appreciated!</p>