To complete davidb’s answer, two things you’re doing wrong are:
1) you’re calling a model’s function from a controller, when the model function is only defined in the model itself. So you do need to call
Project.form_search
and define the function with
def self.form_search
2) you’re calling params from the model. In the MVC architecture, the model doesn’t know anything about the request, so params is not defined there. Instead, you’ll need to pass the variable to your function like you’re already doing…