I'm trying to pass in both the field and the value in a find call: @employee = Employee.find(:all, :conditions => [ '? = ?', params[:key], params[:value].to_i) The output is SELECT * FROM `employees` WHERE ('is_manager' = 1) Which returns no results, however when I try this directly in mysqsl using the same call without the '' around is_manager, it works fine. How do I convert my params[:key] value to a symbol so that the resulting SQL call looks like: SELECT * FROM `employees` WHERE (is_manager = 1) Thanks, D