Querying Named Scopes Across Models with ActiveRecord::Relation#merge

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Hi, I'm Chris. I'm the creator of GoRails, Hatchbox.io and Jumpstart. I spend my time creating tutorials and tools to help Ruby on Rails developers build apps better and faster.

About This Episode

Use the merge method to prevent duplication of ActiveRecord scopes when you're querying across different models

Notes

After years of working with ActiveRecord and watching it change so much, it is exciting to find new features you didn't know about. The one I discovered this week is ActiveRecord#merge. It is one of the most underused methods in ActiveRecord, due in part, to the name. It isn't necessarily clear what they mean by "merge" but it's simply a way of using a named scope on a joined model.

Say we have two models that are associated and one of them has a scope:

class Author < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :books
end
class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :author

  scope :available, ->{ where(available: true) }
end

Let's say we want to join the tables to find all Authors who have books that are available. Without ActiveRecord#merge, we have to make this query:

Author.joins(:books).where("books.available = ?", true)
SELECT "authors".* FROM "authors" INNER JOIN "books" ON "books"."author_id" = "authors"."id" WHERE "books"."available" = 't'

But with ActiveRecord#merge, this becomes a whole lot cleaner and we don't duplicate the available scope:

Author.joins(:books).merge(Book.available)
SELECT "authors".* FROM "authors" INNER JOIN "books" ON "books"."author_id" = "authors"."id" WHERE "books"."available" = 't'

As you can see, the resulting SQL queries are exactly the same. ActiveRecord#merge is a great way to reduce the duplication in your code to continue relying on the named scopes you define in your models. I really want to see more people using this so please share this around!

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