Pablo Fernandez

For those cases in which there can be one and only one record on the database with certain fields and I don’t just want to get the first one and silently get the wrong one. I want to make sure there’s one and only one, so, I wrote this little extension to ActiveRecord that does exactly that:

module ActiveRecordExtension
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  class_methods do
    def one_and_only
      records = limit(2).all.to_a
      if records.count > 1
        raise "#{self} generated more than one record when expecting only one."
      else
        records.first
      end
    end

    def one_and_only!
      one_and_only.tap do |record|
        if record.nil?
          raise "#{self} didn't generate any records."
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

ActiveRecord::Base.send(:include, ActiveRecordExtension)

The first method, one_and_only, will raise an exception if there’s more than one item but it’ll return null if there aren’t any. one_and_only! will fail if there isn’t exactly one and only one record in the database.

If you don’t know why I’m calling this The Highlander query, you should go and watch Christopher Lambert’s masterpiece.