Ruby on Rails 2.1 introduced the concept of named scopes. During a friday afternoon we discussed named scopes and wanted to have it available for us to use. We ended up modifying an existing behavior for CakePHP to make it a little bit easier to use.
Named scopes are essentially a shorthand for a frequently used set of conditions you need when you want to query your model. So if you have a User model and you want to find all the active users which are named “Joe”, you would normally end up with this:
$this->User->find(array('conditions' => array('is_active' => 1, 'name' => 'Joe'))); |
Using named scopes you can write it like this:
$this->User->active->find(array('conditions' => array('name' => 'Joe'))); |
Which is not only shorter to write, but also easier to read. And it also leads to better maintainable code.
Our modified behavior requires you to modify your app_model (Without it, the $this->User->active shorthand will not work). You can read the installation and usage instructions on github, where you can also find the code. Enjoy!
Nice job but were you guys aware Joel Moss built this in 2008? https://github.com/joelmoss/cakephp-namedscope
Heh, no not at all
(I suppose this may be a bit sloppy on my part, but it was a friday afternoon project 
)