Want to find records with no associated records in Rails

Consider a simple association...

class Person
   has_many :friends
end

class Friend
   belongs_to :person
end

What is the cleanest way to get all persons that have NO friends in ARel and/or meta_where?

And then what about a has_many :through version

class Person
   has_many :contacts
   has_many :friends, :through => :contacts, :uniq => true
end

class Friend
   has_many :contacts
   has_many :people, :through => :contacts, :uniq => true
end

class Contact
   belongs_to :friend
   belongs_to :person
end

I really don't want to use counter_cache - and I from what I've read it doesn't work with has_many :through

I don't want to pull all the person.friends records and loop through them in Ruby - I want to have a query/scope that I can use with the meta_search gem

I don't mind the performance cost of the queries

And the farther away from actual SQL the better...

Update 4 - Rails 6.1

Thanks to Tim Park for pointing out that in the upcoming 6.1 you can do this:

Person.where.missing(:contacts)

Thanks to the post he linked to too.

Update 3 - Rails 5

Thanks to @Anson for the excellent Rails 5 solution (give him some +1s for his answer below), you can use left_outer_joins to avoid loading the association:

Person.left_outer_joins(:contacts).where(contacts: { id: nil })

I've included it here so people will find it, but he deserves the +1s for this. Great addition!

Update 2

Someone asked about the inverse, friends with no people. As I commented below, this actually made me realize that the last field (above: the :person_id) doesn't actually have to be related to the model you're returning, it just has to be a field in the join table. They're all going to be nil so it can be any of them. This leads to a simpler solution to the above:

Person.includes(:contacts).where(contacts: { id: nil })

And then switching this to return the friends with no people becomes even simpler, you change only the class at the front:

Friend.includes(:contacts).where(contacts: { id: nil })

Update

Got a question about has_one in the comments, so just updating. The trick here is that includes() expects the name of the association but the where expects the name of the table. For a has_one the association will generally be expressed in the singular, so that changes, but the where() part stays as it is. So if a Person only has_one :contact then your statement would be:

Person.includes(:contact).where(contacts: { person_id: nil })

Original

Better:

Person.includes(:friends).where(friends: { person_id: nil })

For the hmt it's basically the same thing, you rely on the fact that a person with no friends will also have no contacts:

Person.includes(:contacts).where(contacts: { person_id: nil })

smathy has a good Rails 3 answer.

For Rails 5, you can use left_outer_joins to avoid loading the association.

Person.left_outer_joins(:contacts).where( contacts: { id: nil } )

Check out the api docs. It was introduced in pull request #12071.

This is still pretty close to SQL, but it should get everyone with no friends in the first case:

Person.where('id NOT IN (SELECT DISTINCT(person_id) FROM friends)')

Persons that have no friends

Person.includes(:friends).where("friends.person_id IS NULL")

Or that have at least one friend

Person.includes(:friends).where("friends.person_id IS NOT NULL")

You can do this with Arel by setting up scopes on Friend

class Friend
  belongs_to :person

  scope :to_somebody, ->{ where arel_table[:person_id].not_eq(nil) }
  scope :to_nobody,   ->{ where arel_table[:person_id].eq(nil) }
end

And then, Persons who have at least one friend:

Person.includes(:friends).merge(Friend.to_somebody)

The friendless:

Person.includes(:friends).merge(Friend.to_nobody)

Both the answers from dmarkow and Unixmonkey get me what I need - Thank You!

I tried both out in my real app and got timings for them - Here are the two scopes:

class Person
  has_many :contacts
  has_many :friends, :through => :contacts, :uniq => true
  scope :without_friends_v1, -> { where("(select count(*) from contacts where person_id=people.id) = 0") }
  scope :without_friends_v2, -> { where("id NOT IN (SELECT DISTINCT(person_id) FROM contacts)") }
end

Ran this with a real app - small table with ~700 'Person' records - average of 5 runs

Unixmonkey's approach (:without_friends_v1) 813ms / query

dmarkow's approach (:without_friends_v2) 891ms / query (~ 10% slower)

But then it occurred to me that I don't need the call to DISTINCT()... I'm looking for Person records with NO Contacts - so they just need to be NOT IN the list of contact person_ids. So I tried this scope:

  scope :without_friends_v3, -> { where("id NOT IN (SELECT person_id FROM contacts)") }

That gets the same result but with an average of 425 ms/call - nearly half the time...

Now you might need the DISTINCT in other similar queries - but for my case this seems to work fine.

Thanks for your help

Unfortunately, you're probably looking at a solution involving SQL, but you could set it in a scope and then just use that scope:

class Person
  has_many :contacts
  has_many :friends, :through => :contacts, :uniq => true
  scope :without_friends, where("(select count(*) from contacts where person_id=people.id) = 0")
end

Then to get them, you can just do Person.without_friends, and you can also chain this with other Arel methods: Person.without_friends.order("name").limit(10)

A NOT EXISTS correlated subquery ought to be fast, particularly as the row count and ratio of child to parent records increases.

scope :without_friends, where("NOT EXISTS (SELECT null FROM contacts where contacts.person_id = people.id)")

Also, to filter out by one friend for instance:

Friend.where.not(id: other_friend.friends.pluck(:id))

Here is an option using a subquery:

# Scenario #1 - person <-> friend
people = Person.where.not(id: Friend.select(:person_id))

# Scenario #2 - person <-> contact <-> friend
people = Person.where.not(id: Contact.select(:person_id))

The above expressions should generate the following SQL:

-- Scenario #1 - person <-> friend
SELECT people.*
FROM people 
WHERE people.id NOT IN (
  SELECT friends.person_id
  FROM friends
)

-- Scenario #2 - person <-> contact <-> friend
SELECT people.*
FROM people 
WHERE people.id NOT IN (
  SELECT contacts.person_id
  FROM contacts
)