Finding records in Rails (confused over what approach to take)

A user has many tasks.

In the a tasks controller view, need to show tasks for the user. (one view for various statuses - active,assigned,closed etc)

What's the "right" way for getting a list of the tasks, say for the status = active ?

#class method on Task; called from TasksController
Task.fin开发者_高级运维d_for_user(current_user, :active)

#instance method on user; called from TasksController
current_user.find_tasks :active (user model instance)

#the "common" way that is used in controllers and in many examples/articles
current_user.tasks.find(:where => :status = :active)  #Note the "where" part here is pseudo-code (not tested it)

---

Using the association is how I've been trained to do it. Always worked fine, and lets Rails take care of the SQL without any additional code from me.

So current_user.tasks.where(:status => :active), or you could create a scope.

in app/models/task.rb:

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base
    scope :active, :conditions => { :status => :active }
    ...
end 

and call current_user.tasks.active in your controller

also might wanna take a look at the documentation which contains a lot of other nice tips