Question

I have the following scope:

scope :comments, :conditions => ['text_value IS NOT NULL']

But I also want the conditions to say “OR text_value IS NOT EMPTY” (or something to that effect).

I don’t want to select any rows where text_value is empty/blank.

Answer 1

As Erwin points out, a simple text_value <> '' comparison will work in this case.

scope :comments, where("text_value <> ''")

(Rails 3 prefers this query syntax for scope—as well as find, all, etc.—rather than an options hash e.g. :conditions => .... The latter is deprecated in Rails 3.1.)

In Rails 4, the second argument should be a lambda instead:

scope :comments, ->{ where("text_value <> ''") }