I have a Rails 3 project. With Rails 3 came Arel and the ability to reuse one scope to build another. I am wondering if there is a way to use scopes when defining a relationsh
I suggest you take a look at "Named scopes are dead"
The author explains there how powerful Arel is :)
I hope it'll help.
As some comments state, the difference is now a matter of personal taste.
However, I still personally recommend to avoid exposing Arel's scope to an upper layer (being a controller or anything else that access the models directly), and doing so would require: