There was a lot of confusion about explit/implicit hash parameter notation, with people expecting this to generate an OR query :

User.where.any_of(name: 'Doe', active: true)

This wouldn't work, since there is only one parameter, here : {name: 'Doe', active: true}, so there's a single group of condition that is joined as a AND. To achieve expected result, this should have been used :

User.where.any_of({name: 'Doe'}, {active: true})

To be true to principle of least surprise, we now automatically expand parameters consisting of a single Hash as a hash for each key, so first query will indeed generate :

User.where.any_of(name: 'Doe', active: true)
# => SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = 'Doe' OR active = '1'

Grouping conditions can still be achieved using explicit curly brackets :

User.where.any_of({first_name: 'John', last_name: 'Doe'}, active: true)
# => SELECT * FROM users WHERE (first_name = 'John' AND last_name = 'Doe') OR active = '1'

This gem provides #any_of and #none_of on ActiveRecord.

#any_of is inspired by any_of from mongoid.

Its main purpose is to both :

• remove the need to write a sql string when we want an OR
• allows to write dynamic OR queries, which would be a pain with a string

It allows to compute an OR like query that leverages AR's #where syntax:

User.where.any_of(first_name: 'Joe', last_name: 'Joe')
# => SELECT * FROM users WHERE first_name = 'Joe' OR last_name = 'Joe'

You can separate sets of hash condition by explicitly group them as hashes :

User.where.any_of({first_name: 'John', last_name: 'Joe'}, {first_name: 'Simon', last_name: 'Joe'})
# => SELECT * FROM users WHERE ( first_name = 'John' AND last_name = 'Joe' ) OR ( first_name = 'Simon' AND last_name = 'Joe' )

Each #any_of set is the same kind you would have passed to #where :

Client.where.any_of("orders_count = '2'", ["name = ?", 'Joe'], {email: '[email protected]'})

You can as well pass #any_of to other relations :

Client.where("orders_count = '2'").where.any_of({ email: '[email protected]' }, { email: '[email protected]' })

And with associations :

User.find(1).posts.where.any_of({published: false}, "user_id IS NULL")

The best part is that #any_of accepts other relations as parameter, to help compute dynamic OR queries :

banned_users = User.where(banned: true)
unconfirmed_users = User.where("confirmed_at IS NULL")
inactive_users = User.where.any_of(banned_users, unconfirmed_users)

#none_of is the negative version of #any_of. This will return all active users :

banned_users = User.where(banned: true)
unconfirmed_users = User.where("confirmed_at IS NULL")
active_users = User.where.none_of(banned_users, unconfirmed_users)

activerecord_any_of uses WhereChain, which has been introduced in rails-4. In rails-3, simply call #any_of and #none_of directly, without using #where :

manual_removal = User.where(id: params[:users][:destroy_ids])
User.any_of(manual_removal, "email like '%@example.com'", {banned: true})
@company.users.any_of(manual_removal, "email like '%@example.com'", {banned: true})
User.where(offline: false).any_of( manual_removal, "email like '%@example.com'", {banned: true})

In your Gemfile :

gem 'activerecord_any_of'

Activerecord_any_of supports rails >= 3.2.13 and rails-4 (let me know if tests pass for rails < 3.2.13, I may edit gem dependencies).

User.where( "email LIKE '%@example.com" ).where( active: true ).or( offline: true )

What does this query do ? where (email LIKE '%@example.com' AND active = '1' ) OR offline = '1' ? Or where email LIKE '%@example.com' AND ( active = '1' OR offline = '1' ) ? This can quickly get messy and counter intuitive.

The MongoId solution is quite elegant. Using #any_of, it is made clear which conditions are grouped through OR and which are grouped through AND :

• User.where( "email LIKE '%@example.com" ).where.any_of({ active: true }, { offline: true })
• fakes = User.where( "email LIKE '%@example.com'" ).where( active: true ); User.where.any_of( fakes, { offline: true })

Testing is done using TravisCI. You can use the wonderful wwtd gem to run all tests locally. By default, the task to run is bundle exec rake spec, and will run against sqlite3 in memory. You can change the database like so: DB=postgresql bundle exec rake spec. Please note that you may need to change the credentials for your database in the database.yml file. Do not commit those changes.

This gem is extracted from a pull request made to activerecord core, and still hope to be merged. So, any pull request here should respects usual Rails contributing rules when it makes sense (especially : coding conventions) to make integration in source pull request easy.

MIT-LICENSE.