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Rails 7: How to Properly Scope a Model with Default Scope and Avoid Conflicts?

πŸ‘€ Views: 30 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-06-08
ruby-on-rails activerecord scopes Ruby

I'm trying to debug I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm running into issues with using default scopes in my Rails 7 application that are conflicting with other scopes. I have a `User` model that's meant to always retrieve users who are active by default. I've defined a default scope for this, but I also need a custom scope to fetch users by their role. However, when I try to apply the role scope, it seems to ignore the default scope and returns all users instead of just the active ones. Here's the relevant part of my `User` model: ```ruby class User < ApplicationRecord default_scope { where(active: true) } scope :by_role, ->(role) { where(role: role) } end ``` When I call the scope like this: ```ruby User.by_role('admin').to_sql ``` The resulting SQL query looks like this: ```sql SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."role" = 'admin' ``` As you can see, the default scope for `active: true` is missing, so all users are being retrieved. I’ve tried wrapping the call in `unscope` to see if it would help, like this: ```ruby User.unscoped.by_role('admin') ``` But this just seems to completely ignore the default scope, which isn’t what I want. It's critical for my application that we maintain the default behavior of only showing active users while still being able to filter by role. I read the Rails guides on default scopes and scoping in general, but couldn't find a clear solution for this scenario. How can I structure my scopes in a way that avoids this conflict? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. Any ideas what could be causing this? My development environment is macOS. How would you solve this? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Any examples would be super helpful.