with_scope

I was writing a custom ‘find_or_create’ method on a model today, that I was planning to use from an association collection. I wanted it to pick up the association’s scope (the foreign key value). It turns out, it happens automatically.

Here’s an example:

class Room
  has_many :members
end

class Member
  belongs_to :room
  class << self
    def find_or_create_for_invitation(id_or_email)
      where(:id => id).first || where(:email => email).first
      # ... or create
    end
  end
end

What I really want, is for my member find-or-create to be scoped to the room it’s on when I do room.members.find_or_create_for_invitation(params[:invitee]).

I figured it was possible, so I set a debugger breakpoint in find_or_create_for_invitation and checked out the available information. What I found is that the static method is called inside of a with_scope block, so Member.scoped_methods has some useful information. In this case, it’s an array with one element, the scoped association relation (i.e. the thing returned by room.members). It’s possible for the array to contain hashes, too, and several elements, if there are several nested scopes. So, any find-like or create-like calls that you make inside the class method will automatically get the right scope.