Ruby On Rails Interview Questions and Answers

Question: What is Scope in Ruby on Rails?

Scopes are nothing more than SQL scope fragments. By using these fragments one can cut down on having to write long queries each time you access content.

Say you typically access content as shown below:

@posts = Post.where("published_at IS NOT NULL AND posts.published_at <= "+ Time.now)

Ruby offers you a nice way to put the where condition inside a scope statement as shown below.

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :published, lambda { 
    { :conditions =>
      ["posts.published_at IS NOT NULL AND posts.published_at <= ?", Time.now]
    }
  }  
  scope :recent, :order => "posts.published_at DESC"
end

Now you can simply access the published posts as: Post.published

@posts = Post.published

Also, you can access recent posts as 

@recent_posts = Post.recent