Peter Marklund's Home

I'm at the Big Nerd Ranch Ruby on Rails bootcamp in a monastery outside Frankfurt right now having a great time. One of the students asked if you can say ActiveRecord::Base.find(:last), which you can't. The value of the first argument is typically :first, but you can't use :last. Just for educational purposes I decided to change that (it's probably not something I would use in production):

ActiveRecord::Base # Make sure class is loaded, which it probably is by now anyway
module ActiveRecord
  class Base
    def self.find_with_last(*args)
      if args.first == :last
        options = extract_options_from_args!(args)
        find_without_last(:first, options.merge(:order => "#{primary_key} DESC"))
      else
        find_without_last(*args)
      end
    end

    class << self # Needed because we are redefining a class method
      alias_method_chain :find, :last
    end    
  end
end

I guess most interestingly this code illustrates how to alias a static method.