Confounding URL typists since 2007.
If you haven’t read Aaron Patterson’s post about the massive rewrite of ARel that happened for version 2.0, do yourself a favor, and go read it. It’s good stuff, and Aaron’s work rewriting ARel was a monumental feat of awesomeness. Plus, it’s responsible for tipping me off that someone else did a momentous rewrite: porting the venerable zombo.com to HTML5. Back? Good. Aaron mentioned, “for people using ARel directly, some methods have been removed, but all previous functionality should be available in one way or another.” Since I spent some time making sure that the old functionality was available to support the arel-2.0 branch of MetaSearch and MetaWhere, I thought I might tackle explaining some of the changes you’ll see.
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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.