What's the right way to do counts in Rails?

Question

I have a rails app with many following pieces of code:

Our active community of <%= Account.find_all_by_admin(false).count %>

My question is is this the right way to do counts on views? It seems so "dirty" is there a more railish, way to do counts? I'm thinking named scopes perhaps, but I just want to be sure that these type of things won't have a greater impact in performance.

Thank You,

Answer 1

You don't need a name scope to perform a count.

Account.where(:admin => false).count

But named scopes are an excellent way to make your code more reusable.

Named scopes don't have any noticeable performance impact on your application.

Answer 2

I would recommend you to avoid direct access to database in my templates because then you're losing a bit of flexibility when it comes to caching.

Try to prepare all the data you need to render in your action instead and then use meaningful instance variables like @number_of_accounts or @accounts.count.

This will make your views cleaner and easier to debug and also a bit more DRY if you render action in different formats (html, json, etc)

As to how do you get your numbers - it doesn't really matter that much, just move away from find_* methods towards scoping and write readable code