rails, how to pass self in function - ruby-on-rails

Question

message and user. my message belongs_to user and user has_many messages.
in one of my views, i call something like
current_user.home_messages?
and in my user model, i have...
def home_messages?
Message.any_messages_for
end
and lastly in my message model, i have
scope :any_messages_for
def self.any_messages_for
Message.where("to_id = ?", self.id).exists?
end
ive been trying to get the current_users id in my message model. i could pass in current_user as a parameter from my view on top but since im doing
current_user.home_messages?
i thought it would be better if i used self. but how do i go about referring to it correctly?
thank you.

Answer 1

You could use a lambda. In your Message model:
scope :any_messages_for, lambda {|user| where('user_id = ?', user.id)}
This would work like so:
Message.any_messages_for(current_user)
And you could add a method to your user model to return true if any messages are found. In this case you use an instance method and pass in the instance as self:
def home_messages?
return true if Message.any_messages_for(self)
end
But really, I'd just do something like this in the User model without having to write any of the above. This uses a Rails method that is created when declaring :has_many and :belongs_to associations:
def home_messages?
return true if self.messages.any?
end

Answer 2

You can do either of the following
def self.any_messages_for(id) #This is a class method
Message.where("to_id = ?", id).exists?
end
to call above method you have to do
User.any_messages_for(current_user.id) #I am assuming any_messages_for is in `User` Model
OR
def any_messages_for #This is a instance method
Message.where("to_id = ?", self.id).exists?
end
to call above method you have to do
current_user.any_messages_for

Answer 3

This stuff in your Message class doesn't make a lot of sense:
scope :any_messages_for
def self.any_messages_for
Message.where("to_id = ?", self.id).exists?
end
The scope macro defines a class method on its own and there should be another argument to it as well; also, scopes are meant to define, more or less, a canned set of query parameters so your any_messages_for method isn't very scopeish; I think you should get rid of scope :any_messages_for.
In your any_messages_for class method, self will be the class itself so self.id won't be a user ID and so it won't be useful as a placeholder value in your where.
You should have something more like this in Message:
def self.any_messages_for(user)
where('to_id = ?', user.id).exists?
# or exists?(:to_id => user.id)
end
And then in User:
def home_messages?
Message.any_messages_for(self)
end
Once all that's sorted out, you can say current_user.home_messages?.