First of all, thanks for the awesome documentation. It’s been a cornerstone for using Rails.
One thing has been bothering me about the rails guide though. According to the guide, if you have a scope that takes arguments, you’re suppose to use a class method instead (Active Record Query Interface — Ruby on Rails Guides). I understand the rationale but I still am leery of using this pattern for several reasons:
- It can be hard sometimes to tell if a class method is returning a scoped relation or not.
- It’s expected that scopes work on scopes/associations/etc but with class methods, it feels like there’s a bit of magic going on. Like how does ActiveRecord know whether a class method is a scope or not? And so on.
- When you use this pattern, you don’t know if you’re looking for a scope or a class method. For example, the “admin” in User.admin might either be a scope or a class method. You don’t know.
- I think this made a lot more sense with Ruby 1.8. Now with 1.8 at its end of life, I think scopes are just as effective since you can specify default arguments with lambdas, use the splat for lambdas, etc. I think the documentation would be better if in the very least it just outlined both methods and did not comment on which was preferred. Thanks.