Associations, named_scope, and "active" records

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello all,

We are converting our application so that user-generated content such as votes, photos, users, comments, etc are all disabled instead of deleted. This serves us better as administrators of the site as well as fits into a UI redesign coming later that will include undo functionality. The question I have is would it be better to place the active=true condition part of all my associations I already have in place (little work), or do I strip my associations down to barebones and build named_scopes for my "active" state, and any other states? The problem here is I would need to append nearly all calls to photo.votes, photo.comments, project.photos, project.votes, etc with .active (much more work).

Which is the better method in the long run? Thanks guys.

2

Makes sense just to add conditions to the associations

so: class Photo   has_many :votes, :conditions => ['active = ? ', true] end

I presume this is what you're planning on doing at the moment?

Less work and I doubt the scope would perform noticeably better (if at all) ?

Why not try both methods and check the speed of each query?

3

I'd suggest that you take a look at acts_as_paranoid for some ideas to implement this without scattering checks all over the application. Also dig around for a discussion on re-implementing acts_as_paranoid with default_scope.

--Matt Jones