Rails Scope returns all instead of nil

This is not a bug or weirdness, after some research i've found its designed on purpose.

First of all,

1. The scope returns an ActiveRecord::Relation

2. If there are zero records its programmed to return all records which is again an ActiveRecord::Relation instead of nil

The idea behind this is to make scopes chainable (i.e) one of the key difference between scope and class methods

Example:

Lets use the following scenario: users will be able to filter posts by statuses, ordering by most recent updated ones. Simple enough, lets write scopes for that:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :by_status, -> status { where(status: status) }
  scope :recent, -> { order("posts.updated_at DESC") }
end

And we can call them freely like this:

Post.by_status('published').recent
# SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" WHERE "posts"."status" = 'published' 
#   ORDER BY posts.updated_at DESC

Or with a user provided param:

Post.by_status(params[:status]).recent
# SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" WHERE "posts"."status" = 'published' 
#   ORDER BY posts.updated_at DESC

So far, so good. Now lets move them to class methods, just for the sake of comparing:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.by_status(status)
    where(status: status)
  end

  def self.recent
    order("posts.updated_at DESC")
  end
end

Besides using a few extra lines, no big improvements. But now what happens if the :status parameter is nil or blank?

Post.by_status(nil).recent
# SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" WHERE "posts"."status" IS NULL 
#   ORDER BY posts.updated_at DESC

Post.by_status('').recent
# SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" WHERE "posts"."status" = '' 
#   ORDER BY posts.updated_at DESC

Oooops, I don’t think we wanted to allow these queries, did we? With scopes, we can easily fix that by adding a presence condition to our scope:

scope :by_status, -> status { where(status: status) if status.present? }

There we go:

Post.by_status(nil).recent
# SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" ORDER BY posts.updated_at DESC

Post.by_status('').recent
# SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" ORDER BY posts.updated_at DESC

Awesome. Now lets try to do the same with our beloved class method:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.by_status(status)
    where(status: status) if status.present?
  end
end

Running this:

Post.by_status('').recent
NoMethodError: undefined method `recent' for nil:NilClass

And :bomb:. The difference is that a scope will always return a relation, whereas our simple class method implementation will not. The class method should look like this instead:

def self.by_status(status)
  if status.present?
    where(status: status)
  else
    all
  end
end

Notice that I’m returning all for the nil/blank case, which in Rails 4 returns a relation (it previously returned the Array of items from the database). In Rails 3.2.x, you should use scoped there instead. And there we go:

Post.by_status('').recent
# SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts" ORDER BY posts.updated_at DESC

So the advice here is: never return nil from a class method that should work like a scope, otherwise you’re breaking the chainability condition implied by scopes, that always return a relation.

Long Story Short:

No matter what, scopes are intended to return ActiveRecord::Relation to make it chainable. If you are expecting first, last or find results you should use class methods

Source: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2013/02/active-record-scopes-vs-class-methods/