Why doesn't Awesome Print work on some Rails collection objects?

Question

Awesome Print generally works perfectly for me in Rails.

But when doing ap Post.all in the Rails console I only get the standard full line output.

Has it to do with the returned ActiveRecord_Relation class or something else, because when an array is returned, like in ap Post.all.each {|p| p}, Awesome Print does it's job.

Answer 1

Why not just convert it to array?

ap Post.all.to_a

or you can create a patch:

alias :old_ap :ap
def ap(object, option={})
  if object.class == ActiveRecord::Relation::ActiveRecord_Relation_Post
    old_ap object.to_a, option
  else
    old_ap object, option
  end
end

---

You are right. Maybe it's an incompatible problem with Rails4 as the last commit on github is 6 months ago. Here is the problem:

awesome_print-1.2.0/lib/awesome_print/ext/active_record.rb@24

def cast_with_active_record(object, type)
  cast = cast_without_active_record(object, type)
  return cast if !defined?(::ActiveRecord)

  if object.is_a?(::ActiveRecord::Base)
    cast = :active_record_instance
  elsif object.is_a?(Class) && object.ancestors.include?(::ActiveRecord::Base)
    cast = :active_record_class
  elsif type == :activerecord_relation #HERE the problem
    cast = :array
  end
  cast
end

the method will set the cast to array when the type is :activerecord_relation

while in awesome_print-1.2.0/lib/awesome_print/inspector.rb@151

def printable(object)
  case object
  when Array  then :array
  when Hash   then :hash
  when File   then :file
  when Dir    then :dir
  when Struct then :struct
  else object.class.to_s.gsub(/:+/, "_").downcase.to_sym #HERE gets the type
  end
end

But the class of Relation object in rails4 is like:

> Post.all.class
=> ActiveRecord::Relation::ActiveRecord_Relation_Post

So the condition in cast_with_active_record gets a type "activerecord_relation_activerecord_relation_post" rather than "activerecord_relation". Then the condition is failed, and no cast done.

Here's a new patch that may work:

module AwesomePrint
  class Inspector
    alias_method :old_printable, :printable
    private
    def printable(object)
      if object.class.to_s.downcase.include?("activerecord_relation")
        return :activerecord_relation
      end
      old_printable(object)
    end
  end
end

Answer 2

What I am doing is putting this in your ~/.pryrc

class Class
  def list_all
    self.all.each { |s| puts s }
  end
end