So I have my rails application and I have blog posts in my application. For starters I am on rails 2.3.5 and Ruby 1.8.7 For the show page, I am required to give a prev/next link to the prev/next blog post. The catch is that I need to find the next blog where the language column in the database is equal to 'eng'. I had started writing this out in my model and it works but of course this will just find the prev/next record in the database no matter what the language is specified in the column and it will break when the record is not found. def next(lang='eng') BlogEntry.find(self.id - 1) end def prev(lang='eng') BlogEntry.find(self.id + 1) end