Question

I can return a collection of objects, with only one (:limit => 1) but is there a way to return the .first() object only, like not within a collection?

named_scope :profile, :conditions => {:association => 'owner', :resource_type => 'Profile'}, :limit => 1    # => collection of 1 profile but I want the profile only NOT in a collection or array

the workaround is simply to apply .first() to the results, but I’d just like to clean up the code and make it less error prone.

Answer 1

You’ll probably need to create a class method instead:

def self.profile
  where(:association => 'owner', :resource_type => 'Profile').first
end

Note that with Rails 3 you should be using the where(...) syntax, and that when doing .first, you don’t need to specify the limit.