ActiverecordSquared

Tired of typing SomeModel.find_by(id: 12)? Yeah man me too.

Even SomeModel.find(12) still a bit too long?

Wonder why you have to have 2 different methods for find and find_by, when it ought to be reasonably obvious which is called purely by the argument??

Man do we have the solution for you. Introducing...ActiveRecord...squared!...the gem that adds a class-level square bracket method to ActiveRecord objects!

What does it do? Now you can replace that with SomeModel[12]. Also, you can, with zero added effort say: SomeModel[email_address: 'man_email_sucks@example.com']! Revolutionary! You can do SomeModel[params[:id].present? - and ... even if the param is nil, it doesn't error out. You can even do a SomeModel[] to get everything. Stuff you could already do, but ... esier and more elegant! Great!

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'activerecord_squared'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install activerecord_squared

There are 2 main modes for this, and they are based on what is passed in the bracket:

Singular Identifier : Either a string or integer (most likely) - similar to calling SomeModel.where(). This is the default mode. One of the more interesting options here is the ability to call SomeModel[params[:id]] - with nil as the id, and get ... nil. Not an error, like you'd get with find, but nil.

Finder Hash : Similar to calling SomeModel.find_by().

Of course, as this is ActiveRecord, they all return activerecord queries, not actual objects...and can thus be chained appropriately (though ... it's not terribly recommended - this is a shorthand - if you're gonna chain stuff, you probably want to be explicit).

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.