Creating a subset of a model

Question

I have a model in Rails representing stores

class Store < ActiveRecord::Base

A boolean field "draft" in this model determines if the record is active or if it's just a draft. I'm using acts_as_xapian to do searches in my application and it receives a model where the search should be performed. This part is working. However, I only want to run the search only on items that are active (draft==false)

I'm not sure how I can restrict the search on acts_as_xapian, but I could do the same by creating a new model which contains only the items from the class Store with draft==false.

Initially I thought I could use a method with a find

def self.active
  find :all, :conditions => {:draft => false}
end

but acts_as_xapian really wants a model.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can create a scope for that to simplify calling it:

named_scope :bloqueado,
  :conditions => { :bloqueado => true }

This means you can call the scope any time you want to find them:

Store.bloqueado.all

From a matter of style, I'd argue that your logic is inverted. Generally it's best to set boolean fields to represent a positive assertion, such as "published" instead of something akin to true meaning "not published" or draft. This gives you the logical pair "published"/"not published" instead of "draft and not published"/"not draft and not not published".