.many? and .any? Active Record Methods


Jul 02, 2022 | Ruby

ActiveRecord is beautiful and powerful. Here is how .many? and .any? methods work.

.many?

Instead of doing something like collection.size > 1, you can do it with collection.many? like this:

garage.vehicles.count # => 2
garage.vehicles.many? # => true

You can even pass a block to define a criteria like this:

garage.vehicles.many? do |vehicle|
  vehicle.brand == "BMW"
end
.any?

This method checks if a collection has at least one record, and if it does it returns true:

garage.vehicles.count # => 0
garage.vehicles << Vehicle.new(brand: "BMW")
garage.vehicles.count # => 1
garage.vehicles.any? # => true

This method, same as .many? can also take a block to define a criteria:

garage.vehicles.any? do |vehicle|
  vehicle.brand == "BMW"
end

The important thing to know here is that, when the collection is not yet loaded (you didn't call garage.vehicles yet), when you call a .any? method it behaves the same as if you would call .exists? method.

If you are planning to load the collection anyways, it's better to call garages.vehicles.load.any? to avoid an extra query.