Currently dynamic scopes in Rails only allow to scope on attributes,
which is already a great feature.
However, I have made a plugin (http://github.com/jeroenvandijk/
find_by_params/tree/master) that makes this all even better and I was
wondering whether I can integrate this into to the Rails core. This
plugin does also create dynamic scopes for associations.
Say you have the following:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :site
has_many :memberships
named_scope :scoped_by_site, lambda { |field|, {:conditions=>
["sites.name IN (?)", field], :include=>[:sites]} }
named_scope :scoped_by_membership, lambda { |field|, {:conditions=>
["memberships.name IN (?)", field], :include=>[:sites]} }
end
With my plugin the two named scopes are generated by method_missing
like in the implementation of the current dynamic scopes.
The usefulness of these dynamic scopes becomes clear when you look at
the three class methods my plugin adds to ActiveRecord::Base. In my
controllers I always call #find_by_params with the params given. This
way I have created a microformat for search forms.
E.g. The following search logic:
User.find_by_params( :site => { :name => "foo" } )
with the plugin would equal to:
User.find(:all, :conditions => ["sites.name IN (?)",
"foo"], :include=>
[:sites])
can thus be defined in the view with the following:
<form action="/users" method="get" >
<input type="text" name="user[site][name]"/>
</form>
If you see the advantages of this you might also want to consider the
following
<form action="/users" method="get" >
<input type="text" name="user[site][*name*]"/>
</form>
Which would trigger the dynamic scopes to use LIKE and wild cards.
I have used the above functionality in a couple of applications now
and it basically removes 90% of the search code, 90% of the
named_scopes. And where it does not apply directly you can override
find_by_params to, implement the missing behaviour and let a
''super''
call do the rest.
I see enough reasons to implement something similar in the Rails core,
however with Rails 3.0 coming up and the issues with count (https://
rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/2189-count-breaks-sqlite-
has_many-through-association-collection-with-named-scope) this might
be a difficult issue.
Please tell me what you guys think of something like the above and if
this is something for the core.
Jeroen