Rails has_many association count child rows

Question

What is the \"rails way\" to efficiently grab all rows of a parent table along with a count of the number of children each row has?

I don\'t want to use counte

Answer 1

Rails 3 Version

For Rails 3, you'd be looking at something like this:

Article.select( "articles.*, count(comments.id) AS comments_count" )
  .joins( "LEFT OUTER JOIN comments ON comments.article_id = articles.id" )
  .group( "articles.id" )

Thanks to Gdeglin for the Rails 2 version.