[Feature request] [ActiveRecord] Automatically create scopes for models boolean attributes

[Léo Santos]

Hi there!

I would like to introduce a feature that can expedite development, which by the way I think it's one of the greatest advantages of using Ruby on Rails. So, looking to follow the Convention Over Configuration standard, lets say you have:

# a users table

create_table "users", force: true do |t|

  t.boolean  "active", default: true
end

# a User model

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
end

The new feature would automatically add the scope to fetch active users like:

   >User.active

without having to explicitly define it on the model. It is similar to a feature that has already been implemented to boolean attributes that allow us to do things like:

      >user = User.new(active: true)

   >user.active? 

     #=> true 

Do you think it's worthy merging it into Rails core?

Best regards,
Leonardo Santos

[Kasper Timm Hansen]

I don’t think we’d like to autogenerate scopes for your models based on the column type, no.

You might want to look into using an enum backed by an integer ”status” column instead of the boolean column.

That generates a scope as well as making it really easy to add another state, should you need ever need to do so.

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Kasper

[radhames brito]

Hi Leo.

I think it makes more sense to make this an op-in thing like this

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

 boolean_scope :active

end

And then you have the scope ```User.active```, with the extra option of doing ```boolean_scope :active, negative: :inactive``` that would create the scope for the false case.

This of course would raise if there is not column matching the name, since any more work and is easier to declare the scope. Just my 2 cents.

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Kasper

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[Kevin Deisz]

IIRC, this was actually a thing in Rails 2 and it got taken out. I agree with you about the convention over configuration idea, but when you only need the one line of code to get it back, and it relieves a maintenance burden and makes things faster, I'd have to side with it not being in core.

That being said, this is one of those things that would be great for a gem to provide automatically (basically on initialize search through for every boolean column and set up scopes). Sounds like a good project if you've got time to take it on.

Kevin D. Deisz

CTO, CultureHQ

[Geoff Harcourt]

Hi Leo,

A suggestion if you wanted to build this feature as a gem: the Pacecar gem used to add these scopes automatically. It's no longer maintained, but you could dig up some of the code to just get the automatic scopes for booleans.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/pacecar

-Geoff

[Léo Santos]

That's great guys! Will definitely try to take a deeper look into it and maybe build this as a gem. Thanks for the feedback