As your rails app gets more complex you will end up with models that are related to each other but with one or more models between them.

Say you have the following models:

class Order
  has_many :line_items
end

class LineItem
  has_one :product
end

class Product
  belongs_to :line_item
end

In this case, an Order can have many products, but you have to go through line items to get to them.

So, when you have an order, how do you get its products?

At first, you might write something like this:

 order.line_items.map(&:product)

This might seem ok at first, until you realize there's an N+1 problem here. Getting the products this way will run one SQL query for every product in the order:

LineItem Load (0.2ms)  SELECT "line_items".* FROM "line_items" WHERE "line_items"."order_id" = ?  [["order_id", 5]]
Product Load (0.1ms)  SELECT  "products".* FROM "products" WHERE "products"."id" = ? LIMIT 1  [["id", 7]]
Product Load (0.1ms)  SELECT  "products".* FROM "products" WHERE "products"."id" = ? LIMIT 1  [["id", 8]]

Depending on your SQL skill level, you might realize there's a way to get the products with one query; it's just unclear how to do this with Active Record.

The Solution

It turns out there is an elegant way to solve this with active record associations. In the rails guide, they refer to this as a 'short cut' between models. All we need to do is add this one line to the Order class:

class Order
  has_many :line_items
  has_many :products, through: :line_items # new code
end

With this 'short cut' in place we can get from an order to products with one method call:

order.products

And that loads the products with one SQL query:

Product Load (0.1ms)  SELECT "products".* FROM "products"
INNER JOIN "line_items" ON "products"."id" = "line_items"."product_id"
WHERE "line_items"."order_id" = ?  [["order_id", 5]]

Another really important difference between this code and the map solution is that order.products does not load the records right away - instead, it returns an ActiveRecord_Associations_CollectionProxy. The map version returns an array.

What the heck is a collection proxy and why is that a good thing?

Basically, the proxy is something that allows you further refine the SQL by chaining method calls onto it.

For example, say you only want the products for the order with a price greater than a certain amount:

order.products.where('price > 300')

Powerful stuff.

But wait, there's more

Let's introduce one more model into this example to make it more realistic. Say, we have a User model like this:

class User
  has_many :orders
end

Now, how can we get a list of all of the products a user has ordered before?

This is the same kind of problem. We know they are related to each other, but the relationship spans several models.

It turns out, this is trivial with Active Record. We can just add another 'short cut' with has_many through in the user class:

class User
  has_many :products, through: :orders
end

# then, we can do this
some_user.products => it works!

Be careful though

There is one thing to look out for with this last example though. What if a user purchased the same product more than once?

Calling user.products will return duplicate products.

There are a few ways to work around this:

1) Remember to call 'distinct' wherever you need the products:

some_user.products.distinct

2) Change our has_many through declaration to always return distinct products:

class User
  has_many :products, -> { distinct }, through: :orders
end

So, depending on your schema and situation you may need to look out for duplicate records being returned.

Want to try it out?

I set up a demo rails app on GitHub with these exact models. If you want to see firsthand how this works, clone the repo and fire up a console to try out a few queries.