Confounding URL typists since 2007.
Since the release of ActiveRecord Query Interface 3.0, I think the line has been pretty blurry for the Rails community about where ActiveRecord ends and Arel begins. I’ve seen folks attribute ActiveRecord::PredicateBuilder to Arel, and I’ve seen folks assume that an ActiveRecord::Relation is an Arel object. Neither is the case. Since MetaSearch and MetaWhere both use combinations of ActiveRecord::Relation and Arel under the hood, and I’ve spent some time putting together patches for both Rails core and Arel, the blurry line between them has become more distinct for me. In this post, I hope to clear up some misunderstandings before Rails 3 is released, and the AR 3.0 query interface becomes the norm.
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In a few recent posts, you may have noticed me mention my Arel fork on GitHub. I’ve never really devoted a post to discussing that fork, what’s different about it, and why it exists, so here’s some background.