Only get published items

Rails
1

Hi!

I’m new to Ruby and Rails and I’m trying it out with an app that
displays artists and their songs. The songs are nested inside the
artists.
Each song has a “published” and a “approved” attribute that is set to
true if the song has been approved and published.

I also have an admin area, mysite.com/admin/…

On the frontend I only want to show published and approved items and
in the admin area I want to show all songs.

I have created a scope in my model like this:
scope :frontend_songs, where(:approved => true, :published => true)

Which I want to apply on the frontend only. In my songs controller I
added a before_filter :front_songs
and
…
private

def front_songs
@songs = @songs.frontend_songs
end

This works good on pages that are not nested inside the artists (like
“latest songs”)

So I have to do something similar for my Artist controller as well.

Is there a better way to do this so I only have to specify once that
songs that has published => false should not be served, regardless if
it comes through the artists or songs controller? Like a global scope
that always applies except in the admin area.

I have read somewhere about global scopes I think (??) but that you
should avoid them. Also, it would break my admin area as well.

So, any ideas?

2

I would take advantage of arel’s method chaining and break down the
problem into smaller chunks. Instead of using true scopes, I’d create
some useful class methods like so:

class Song < ActiveRecord::Base

def self.published
where(:published => true)
end

def self.approved
where(:approved => true)
end

end

Then in your controllers, call the class methods to match whatever
special conditions you need on your song collection (or none at all
in, admin’s case):

songs_controller:
@songs = Song.published.approved

admin_controller:
@songs = Song.all

Related reading:
http://www.railway.at/2010/03/09/named-scopes-are-dead/
http://elabs.se/blog/24-scopes-are-obsolete