This is something that many may already use as a best practice, but if not it’s something simple and convenient to add to your repertoire. Sometimes you may have a model that requires additional information if a certain condition is met. For example, I may require a user to add more information about themselves if they wish to be listed publicly, whereas I would not if they do not wish to be listed.

Rails’s named_scopes are great, and the ability to chain named_scopes together are even better. I am sure many of us have done something like this before:

User.active.live_in('Virginia')

That would give you the active users who live in the state of Virginia. You would define something like these in your User model: