Paul Barry

Are you looking for a way to select a random record that plays nice with named scope in your Rails app? Throw this into config/initializers/active_record_random.rb:

class ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.random
    if (c = count) > 0
      first(:offset => rand(c)) 
    end
  end
end

Now you can call random the same way you would call first or all. That means you can do Widget.random to get a random widget or Widget.fancy.random, to get a random fancy widget, assuming you have defined the fancy named scope for Widget.