This is a feature backported from Rails 2.1 because of its usefullness not only with will_paginate, but in other aspects when managing complex conditions that you want to be reusable.
All subclasses of ActiveRecord::Base have two named_scopes:
all, which is similar to a find(:all) query, and
scoped, which allows for the creation of anonymous scopes, on the fly: Shirt.scoped(:conditions => {:color => 'red'}).scoped(:include => :washing_instructions)
These anonymous scopes tend to be useful when procedurally generating complex queries, where passing intermediate values (scopes) around as first-class objects is convenient.
# File lib/will_paginate/named_scope.rb, line 11 def self.included(base) base.class_eval do extend ClassMethods named_scope :scoped, lambda { |scope| scope } end end
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