Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Rails Collection#exists?

I've been using Rails for almost a decade, and find I still don't know even close to all it has to offer. Today, I was browsing through an open source app, and stumbled across this code:

unless feed.posts.exists?(@post.id)
  feed.posts << @post
end

I'd never seen or used exists? on a collection before, so I looked it up. And of course, there it is, right in the Rails Guides Association Basics - methods added by has many!

Digging in a bit, what arguments can exists? take? Here's the reference.

Turns out there a lot of options!. Integer, string, array, hash, false, or no args.

Well that's kinda neat! So what does the no args do?

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It seems to behave similar to any?, and return true if there are any members of the collection, false if it's empty.

TLDR: Read the Rails Guides. A decade in, you'll probably still learn something!

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