mockra

Rails offers a wide range of features that aren’t commonly used, but are very helpful in the right situation. A feature I’ve found useful when I need to display an association count for a list of records is counter_cache.

With counter_cache, Rails will automatically update a column on your primary record whenever an association is added. Given an example of a post with comments, your Rails code will look like:

You can then use post.comments_count when displaying a list of posts to increase performance and avoid unneeded queries to the database.