Deleting VS Finding Orphans using ActiveRecord helpers - ruby-on-rails

I'm trying to delete all the organizations that no longer have any users.
Using the below code, I can find all the records I wish to delete:
Organization.includes(:users)
.where(users: { id: nil })
.references(:users)
When I add delete_all, I get the same error I would get if I didn't include references:
PG::UndefinedTable: ERROR: missing FROM-clause entry for table "users"
I could probably write the solution in pure SQL, but I don't understand why Rails isn't keeping the reference to users when I add the delete_all statement.
Here are some more details:
Organization:
has_many :users
User:
belongs_to :organization

I've found the includes useful only for eager loading (and it can rarely handle my cases), and when coupled with references it generates something completely insane (aliasing every single field with something like tN_rM) even though it actually does a LEFT OUTER JOIN... Which could help if it didn't vanish once delete_all appears!
I've found that it's much clearer and simpler just to use exists. It's Arel (and there's no point in avoiding it, its under the hood of ActiveRecord anyway), but it's such a tiny portion that it's barely noticeable:
Organization.where(
User.where('users.organization_id = organizations.id').exists.not
)
Or, if this string of SQL doesn't look nice to you, use a bit more Arel, so it gets noticeable:
Organization.where(
User.where(organization_id: Organization.arel_table[:id]).exists.not
) # I tend to extract these ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ into local variables
That handles chaining .delete_all on top just fine, since it's not (syntactically) a join, even though it's effectively equivalent to one.
The magic behind this
SQL has an EXISTS operator that is similar in functionality to a join, except for inability of selecting fields from a joined table. It forms a valid boolean expression which can be negated and thrown into WHERE-conditions.
In the "SQL-free" form I'm using an expression "column of a table", which turns out to be usable in Rails' hash-conditions. It's an accidental discovery, one of the few uses of Arel that does not make code too bulky.

I'm not sure how you plan to implement this in the MVC framework, but it seems clean to do the organization purge via model action. Whenever a user is deleted, check to see of the organization has any remaining members.
in the User.rb
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
before_destroy :close_user
...
def user_organization
Organization.where(user_id: id)
end
private
def close_user
unless user_organization.users.any?
user_organization.destroy
end
end
end
Added To apply callback delete solution to users being member of many organizations
If the user has multiple organizations
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
before_destroy :close_user
...
def user_organizations
Organization.where(user_id: id)
end
private
def close_user
user_organization.find_each do |organization|
unless organization.users.any?
organization.destroy
end
end
end
Caveat: this is not tested, didn't fail syntax. I don't have the data to test it fully but I think it will work. But it means running this action after every user delete, which is a system architecture decision. If it's an option, it might be worth a try.

Related

Ruby On Rails: Disable `delete_all` when table name is present

delete_all is useful, but I never want to see it called on the same line with a table name. I'd like to disable things like TableName.destroy_all in both console and code.
One interesting issue happened earlier this month:
Application.destroy_all was called on a model instead of applications.destroy_all
(the model has_many applications)
For somebody new to ROR, it looks very similar, but the results were disastrous.
I'm open to some form of lint/code style tool, but that really wouldn't catch it in the console scenario. (Plus, I haven't been able to get rubo-cop to do something like this yet)
Basically, I'm asking for a way to make the console and codebase more secure so that newer developers can't inadvertantly delete everything in a table.
I'm not entirely clear on what you are trying to accomplish, but you could try overriding the method in your ApplicationModel with something like this (assuming Rails 5 or greater, or otherwise a root model in existence).
class ApplicationModel < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.destroy_all(*args)
raise('Cannot destroy all records of a model this way. Did you mean to delete a subset of records instead?')
end
end
Possibly make this method private if you'd like it even harder to run...
def self.destroy_all(*args)
raise('Cannot destroy all records of a model this way. Did you mean to delete a subset of records instead?')
end
private_class_method :destroy_all
You could get fancy and allow this to be bypassed with a special argument that you check for, but give this a try and see how it goes.

Return nil object if after_initialize callback returns false

My Rails app has many models that form a hierarchy. For example: Retailer > Department > Product Category > Product > Review.
A business requirement is that high-authority users can "share" any individual element in the hierarchy with a new or existing "normal" user. Without having an object shared with them, normal users have no rights to see (or do anything else) with any object in any level of the hierarchy.
The sharing process includes a choice of whether the share grants permission to read-only, read-update, or full CRUD on the target object.
Sharing any object grants R/O, R/W or CRUD permission to that object and all lower level objects in the hierarchy, and R/O permission to all of the direct ancestors of the object. The object collection grows organically, so the permission system works by just logging the user_id, the object_id of the share, and the nature of the share (R/O, CRUD, etc). As the population of objects in this hierarchy grows all the time, it is impractical to create an explicit permission record in the DB for every user/object combination.
Instead, at the start of the user request cycle, ApplicationController gathers all the permission records (user X has CRUD permission to Department #5) and holds them in a hash in memory. A Permissions model knows how to evaluate the hash when any object is passed to it - Permission.allow?(:show, Department#5) would return true or false depending on the content of the user's permission hash.
Let's take, for example, the Department model:
# app/models/department.rb
class Department < ActiveRecord::Base
after_initialize :check_permission
private
def check_permission
# some code that returns true or false
end
end
When the check_permission method returns true, I want Department.first to bring back the first record in the database as normal, BUT, if check_permission returns false, I want to return nil.
Right now, I have a solution whereby default scopes trigger a permissions check, but this is causing 2X the number of queries, and for classes with a lot of objects, memory problems and time/performance issues are sure to be on the horizon.
My goal is to use after_initialize callbacks to pre-permission the objects.
It would appear however that after_initialize is unable to block the original object from being returned. It does allow me to reset the values of the attributes of the object, but not to dispense with it.
Anybody know how to achieve this?
EDIT:
Many thanks for all of the answers and comments offered so far; hopefully this extended version of the question clarifies things.
Basically you need to check for access rights (or permissions) before returning a database query result. And you are trying to integrate this logic into your models.
It is possible, but not with the design you described in your question. It is not clean to implement this directly in ActiveRecord adapter methods (such as first, all, last etc...). You need to rethink your design.
(skip to point 'D' if this is too much reading)
You have several choices, which all depend on the way your permissions are defined. Let's look at few cases:
A. A user have a list of departments he owns and only him can access them
You can simply implement this as a has_many/belongs_to association with Active Record Associations
B. Users and Departments are independent (in other words: no ownership such as described in the previous case) and permission can be set individually for each users and each departments.
Simply again, you can implement a has_and_belongs_to_many association with Active Record Associations. You will need to create web logic so the administrator of your application can add/edit/remove access rights.
C. More complex case: the existing authorization libraries
Most people will turn to authorization solutions such as cancan, pundit or other
D. When those authorization libraries are oversized for your needs (actually, my case in most of my projects), I found that implementing authorization through rails scoping answers all my needs.
Let's see it through a simple example. I want administrators to be able to access the whole database records ; and regular users to access only departments with status = open and only during operation hours (say 8am-6pm). I write a scope that implement my permission logic
# Class definition
class Department
scope :accessible_by -> (user) do
# admin user have all access, always
if user.is_admin?
all
# Regular user can access only 'open' departments, and only
# if their request is done between 8am and 6pm
elsif Time.now.hour >= 8 and Time.now.hour <= 18
where status: 'open'
# Fallback to return ActiveRecord empty result set
else
none
end
end
end
# Fetching without association
Department.accessible_by(current_user)
# Fetching through association
Building.find(5).departments.accessible_by(current_user)
Defining a scope obliges us to use it everywhere in our code. You can think of the risk to "forget" going through the scope and accessing directly the model (i.e writing Department.all instead of Department.accessible_by(current_user)). So that's why you must solidly test your permissions in your specs (at the controller or features level).
Note In this example we do not return nil when the permission fails (as you mentioned in your question), but an empty result set instead. It is generally better so you keep the ActiveRecord method chaining capability. But you could also raise an exception and rescue it from your controller then redirect to a 'not authorized' page for example.
That is not what the after_initialize callback is used for. Instead, you could just define a method that does the same thing. For example, put this in your Department model and it should achieve the results you are looking for:
def self.get_first
check_permission ? first : nil
end
UPDATE
I'm not exactly sure how safe something like this would be, but you could just override the all method as the other query methods are based off of it.
class Department < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.all
check_permission ? super : super.none
end
private
def self.check_permission
# some code that returns true or false
end
end
You are probably better off using some authorization framework though.
UPDATE 2
Thinking about this a little more, I strongly recommend using a different approach. You really shouldn't be overriding methods like all as there will surely be unintended side effects.
A practical alternative would be to create a has_and_belongs_to_many relationship between Department and User. Here is how you would set it up:
user.rb
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :departments
...
end
department.rb
class Department < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :users
...
end
Then run these commands in your terminal:
rails g migration CreateJoinTableDepartmentsUsers departments users
rake db:migrate
Now you can add users to a department with #department.users << #user, or departments to a user with #user.departments << #department. This should achieve the functionality that you are looking for.
#user.departments will return only departments for that user, #user.departments.first will return the first department for that user or nil if it doesn't have any, and #user.departments.find(1) will return the corresponding department only if it belongs to the user or throw an exception otherwise.
You can use before_create callback to stop record creation if check permission is false. Just return false in check_permission filter and record will be not created.
class Department < ActiveRecord::Base
before_create :check_permission
private
def check_permission
# return false if permission is not allowed
end
end

Rails scope / class method to select items where association is present

Can't seem to wrap my head around this problem. I have a message model below
Message
# content:string
# original_id:integer
# sender_id:integer
# receiver_id:integer
has_one :reply, class_name: "Message", foreign_key: "original_id"
belongs_to :original, class_name: "Message"
Each message can only have one reply and the reply message will have its corresponding original message.
What I'd like to do is create a scope or a class method that allows me to pull replied messages in one batch and unreplied messages in another.
Something like
# return messages that have a reply present
def self.replied
where(reply.present?)
end
# return messages that have no reply
def self.unreplied
where(reply.nil?)
end
so I can chain the methods and ultimately pull messages with
user1.messages.replied
It doesn't currently work because I can't use the where clause unless it's a DB column...so I was thinking about adding a "replied" boolean column into the DB so I could use the where clause but there's probably a solution to this that I'm just not thinking about. A scope with a lambda? I'm stuck right now.
Any help much appreciated
To find those that have been replied is fairly straightforward:
scope :replied, joins(:reply)
as anything without a reply will be filtered out with an INNER JOIN. To find those without replies is a bit more complex - you can either use a LEFT JOIN or an EXISTS subquery to accomplish this. includes is a simple way to force a LEFT JOIN:
scope :unreplied, includes(:reply).
where(replies_messages: {id: nil}).
where(original_id: nil)
An EXISTS subquery may be somewhat more efficient, but more complex to write (at this time), as it would involve invoking Arel tables (or Squeel). For most cases a LEFT JOIN would be 'good enough', and includes is a quick-and-dirty way to force the API to use one.

Ruby on Rails: Instantiate associated models with find_by_sql?

Apparently, include and select can't be used simultaneously on a Rails find query, and this has been repeatedly marked as wontfix:
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/7147
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5371
This strikes me as very inconvenient, because the times I'd want to use include are exactly the same times I'd want to use select - when every bit of performance counts.
Is there any way to work around this and manually generate a combined include-with-select using find_by_sql, or any other method? The trouble is, I'm not aware of any way to emulate the functionality of include, where it instantiates models in memory to hold the included associated models, such that I can enter model1.associated_models and have it not hit the database again.
Have you considered creating model for database view? For example:
Create database view, with your complicated SQL query:
CREATE VIEW production_plan_items AS
SELECT * FROM [...]
INNER JOIN [...];
Create model for this view:
# app/view_model.rb
class ViewModel < ActiveRecord::Base
self.abstract_class = true
def readonly?
true
end
def before_destroy
raise ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord
end
end
# app/models/logical/production_plan_item.rb
module Logical
class ProductionPlanItem < ::ViewModel
end
end
Use as always, but remember that these records are READ ONLY!
Logical::ProductionPlanItem.where( ... )
If performance still be an issue in the future, you can quite easily convert DB views to materialized views using triggers and stored procedures. This will give your application enormous speed boost, and you don't have to change even one line of Rails code.
Enterprise Rails is highly recommended reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Rails-Dan-Chak/dp/0596515200/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293140116&sr=8-1

Rails Trouble creating model instance with one to many relationship

I think there are a lot of places where my design may be screwing this up. I have very limited experience with Rails though. This is happening in Rails 2.3.2 with Postgres 8.3.
We've got two tables in our DB. One called "survey" and one called "survey_timepoint". A survey can have multiple time points so in the survey_timepoint table there is a column called "survey_id" with an fk constraint on it.
I also think I should mention that the tables were not created with a rails migration although they do follow the rails naming conventions. I suspect AR isn't anticipating a constraint on that column and it doesn't know how to handle the situation.
In my rails models I have:
has_many :survey_timepoint
and
belongs_to :survey
If I do something like:
s = Survey.new
s.survey_timepoint.push SurveyTimepoint.new
s.save!
I get:
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: PGError: ERROR: insert or update on table "survey_timepoints" violates foreign key constraint "survey_timepoints_fk"
DETAIL: Key (survey_id)=(59) is not present in table "surveys"
I'm assuming that if I delete that fk constraint on survey_timepoint.survey_id it'll work ok. It seems like I shouldn't have too though. Am I going to be stuck creating and saving each of the objects separately and wrapping the whole process in a transaction? It seems rather un-railsy. Apologies for any necessary information that I may have omitted.
You might want to check the SQL commands being sent. It looks like it is adding the survey_timepoint record before the survey record. Note that you are already dealing with two database changes — the survey and the survey_timepoint — so you should be using a transaction.
You can fix the immediate problem by doing s.save! before adding the timepoint (and then calling it again). My knowledge of Rails functionality is not deep enough to know if there is a more "railsy" way of doing this then wrapping it in a transaction.
I just experimented and found that this works with MySQL:
s = Survey.new()
s.survey_timepoints << SurveyTimepoint.new # Note "survey_timepoints" (plural)
s.save!
I think it would work equally well with PostgreSQL.
It does two inserts, first the Survey, then the timepoint, and wraps them in a transaction.
You can also do it all on one line:
Survey.create!({:name=>'New Survey', :survey_timepoints => [SurveyTimepoint.new]})
Incidentally, for ActiveRecord to work right you have to make sure of your singulars and plurals. (If you want to break the expected forms, you'll need to tell AR you're doing that -- a whole other topic.)
Your tables should be:
surveys
-------
# ...
survey_timepoints
-----------------
survey_id
# ...
And in your models you'd have:
class Survey < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :survey_timepoints
# etc...
end
class SurveyTimepoint < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :survey
end

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