CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails
Peter Nixey
Peter Nixey

Reputation: 16565

What's a database efficient way to check whether an object has one or more children?

I'd like to check whether an object contains one or more children:

if @question.replies.count > 0 
  // do this
else
  // do that
end

however I'd rather not do the db lookups involved in this. Is there a nice efficient way of doing this query?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 67

Answers (3)

Harish Shetty
Harish Shetty

Reputation: 64363

If you have eager loaded associations, then use the present? method

class User
  has_many :messages
end

class Message
  belongs_to :user
  has_many   :replies
end

current_user.messages.all(:include => :replies).each do |message|
  if message.replies.present?
  else
  end
end

If you haven't loaded the associations to memory, then use the exists? method.

current_user.messages.each do |message|
  if message.replies.exists?
  else
  end
end

The exists? call results in EXISTS check which returns upon finding the first matching row without incurring the cost of getting the row data back from DB.

Note

Other option is to use the counter_cache approach as suggested by @dimuch. The counter_cache solution is efficient if you can alter your DB table structure.

Upvotes: 0

Nick Colgan
Nick Colgan

Reputation: 5508

If you've already loaded replies through an include, you can use @question.replies.length or @question.replies.size (more info here). You can also simplify your if statement to

if @question.replies.present?

Otherwise, you can use a counter_cache column, which will just maintain a column on your questions table (replies_count) that you can access at any time.

Upvotes: 2

dimuch
dimuch

Reputation: 12818

Just use :counter_cache ( http://asciicasts.com/episodes/23-counter-cache-column )

Upvotes: 2

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