There are a few ways to solve this problem. However, I think the easiest is to cache the day of the year that the user is born on as an integer. If stored alongside the timestamp we can quickly get a list but properly handle the full birthday elsewhere, s...

You can easily chain scopes together in your models. class Article < ActiveRecord::Base scope :ordered, order('position ASC') scope :published, ordered.where('published = ?', true) scope :for_homepage, published.limit(3) end Article.for_homepage...

User.find :all, :select => "DISTINCT occupation"

Here is a simple rake task which will instantiate all of your Active Record models, provided that they are located in the RAILS_ROOT/app/models directory. Interestingly, all plugin models are instantiated by default when you run the task, for instance, if...

I'm a big fan of the yaml_db plugin. But I don't like running rake db:data:load, only to find that my db columns mismatch my model attributes, thus aborting the data import task. To quickly add/remove columns/attributes from a model and rebuild the datab...

When you use validations in Rails, db column names are used as 'keys' for error messages. This is usually the preferred way to go about it because this maps nicely to the form fields. However, if you use a virtual attribute this may not be the case. For e...

Active Record find methods for selecting range from http://charlesmaxwood.com/notes-from-reading-activerecordbase/ Student.find(:all, :conditions => { :grade => 9..12 }) return a range Student.find(:all, :conditions => { :grade => [9,11,12] }) will retu...

You can download it here http://github.com/suitmymind/acts-as-taggable-on-steroids as well as read usage info (which is for the most part reprinted here). ./script/plugin install http://svn.viney.net.nz/things/rails/plugins/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids ....

If you have a couple collections from the database and you want to sort it without the help of Active Record, take a look at the sort_by method on Array type. I've used this before when I have a couple of collections which are slightly different but I nee...

If you want to take a look at the SQL being generated by active record while your using the console, you can either type this into the console when it loads ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT) Or you can add it to your environment so that it'...

There are a number of permalink plugins for Rails, http://www.seoonrails.com/even-better-looking-urls-with-permalink_fu, is a good one that I've used before. However, this involves informing the model class (has_permalink :title), adding a route, using t...

Versioning models with the acts_as_versioned plugin cd rails/app ./script/plugin install git://github.com/technoweenie/acts_as_versioned.git ./script/generate model post title:string body:text In your model class Post < ActiveRecord::Base acts_as_ve...