Question

I am using will_paginate with some complicated queries and it is unable to correctly calculate number of total records (in order to display proper number of page links) – namely because of grouping by multiple columns.

So, I am intending to get the SELECT query which would be used to retrieve ALL records, without actually executing it, and wrap it with SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ... manually, in order to get the number of records.

Any ideas how to do it?

Edit: I am using Rails 2.3.x

Answer 1

For Rails 3:

Check out the ActiveRecord::Relation docs at the Rails 3 docs.

# get the relation
rel = User.complex_scope.chained_complex_scope

# get the SQL
# this does not execute the query
sql = rel.to_sql

# find out how many records
# this executes the query behind the scenes
count = rel.size