Support for left outer join in Rails 5

Suppose in a blog application there are authors and posts. A post belongs to an author, while author has many posts.

The app needs to show a list of all the authors along with a number of posts that they have written.

For this, we need to join author and posts table with "left outer join". More about "left outer join" here, here and here .

In Rails 4.x, we need to write the SQL for left outer join manually as Active Record does not have support for outer joins.

authors = Author.join('LEFT OUTER JOIN "posts" ON "posts"."author_id" = "authors"."id"')
                .uniq
                .select("authors.*, COUNT(posts.*) as posts_count")
                .group("authors.id")

Rails 5 has added left_outer_joins method.

authors = Author.left_outer_joins(:posts)
                .uniq
                .select("authors.*, COUNT(posts.*) as posts_count")
                .group("authors.id")

It also allows to perform the left join on multiple tables at the same time.

>> Author.left_joins :posts, :comments
  Author Load (0.1ms)  SELECT "authors".* FROM "authors" LEFT OUTER JOIN "posts" ON "posts"."author_id" = "authors"."id" LEFT OUTER JOIN "comments" ON "comments"."author_id" = "authors"."id"

If you feel left_outer_joins is too long to type, then Rails 5 also has an alias method left_joins.