Scopes

Often times, developers use the same filters against the same table to categorize records by one or more columns, such as getting members of a marketing department:

SELECT * from EMPLOYEES where department = 'marketing'

or getting people from a city:

SELECT * from PEOPLE where CITY = 'Chicago'

Basic scope

If you find yourself doing the same over and over, you can abstract this away into a scope:

public class Employee extends Model {
    static {
        addScope("marketing", "department = 'marketing'");
    }
}

after that, just indicate what scope you need:

 List<Employee> marketers = Employee.scope("marketing").all();

Combine scopes

You can combine multiple scopes in the same request. If you have multiple scopes defined on your model:

public class Employee extends Model {
    static {
        addScope("marketing", "department = 'marketing'");
        addScope("active", "active = 1");
    }
}

then you can combine these scopes:

 List<Employee> activeMarketers = Employee.scopes("marketing", "active").all();

The framework will combine the scope filters together as expected.

Combine scopes and conditions

Further filtering is possible to using the where() method as usual:

 List<Employee> activeMarketers = Employee.scopes("marketing", "active").where("position_level = ?", level).orderBy("created_at desc");

All the normal mechanisms and behavior is still in place.

Scopes allow to abstract away mundane requests and make the code more readable.