Only get published items

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi!

I'm new to Ruby and Rails and I'm trying it out with an app that displays artists and their songs. The songs are nested inside the artists. Each song has a "published" and a "approved" attribute that is set to true if the song has been approved and published.

I also have an admin area, mysite.com/admin/....

On the frontend I only want to show published and approved items and in the admin area I want to show all songs.

I have created a scope in my model like this:   scope :frontend_songs, where(:approved => true, :published => true)

Which I want to apply on the frontend only. In my songs controller I added a before_filter :front_songs and ...   private

  def front_songs     @songs = @songs.frontend_songs   end

This works good on pages that are not nested inside the artists (like "latest songs")

So I have to do something similar for my Artist controller as well.

Is there a better way to do this so I only have to specify once that songs that has published => false should not be served, regardless if it comes through the artists or songs controller? Like a global scope that always applies except in the admin area.

I have read somewhere about global scopes I think (??) but that you should avoid them. Also, it would break my admin area as well.

So, any ideas?

2

I would take advantage of arel's method chaining and break down the problem into smaller chunks. Instead of using true scopes, I'd create some useful class methods like so:

class Song < ActiveRecord::Base

  def self.published     where(:published => true)   end

  def self.approved     where(:approved => true)   end

end

Then in your controllers, call the class methods to match whatever special conditions you need on your song collection (or none at all in, admin's case):

songs_controller: @songs = Song.published.approved

admin_controller: @songs = Song.all

Related reading: http://www.railway.at/2010/03/09/named-scopes-are-dead/ http://elabs.se/blog/24-scopes-are-obsolete