Question

I have the following model:

class Party < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :party_characters
  has_many :characters, :through => :party_characters
  ...

And on my controller I have the following code:

def new
  @party = Party.new
  p @party.characters.any?
  p @party.characters
  p @party.characters.any?
  ...

That writes the following to the console:

true
[]
false

Why does the any? method returns true before the print and false after?

Answer 1

Tried the same thing on the console and got the following results

1.9.3p0 :003 > p = Party.new
 => #<Party id: nil, name: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil> 
1.9.3p0 :004 > p.characters.any?
   (17.9ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "characters" INNER JOIN "party_characters" ON "characters"."id" = "party_characters"."character_id" WHERE "party_characters"."party_id" IS NULL
 => true 
1.9.3p0 :005 > p.characters
 => [] 
1.9.3p0 :006 > p.characters.any?
 => false 

So I decided to check what I had on the party_characters table and found entries with a valid character_id but with a nil party id. I removed those and everything works as supposed.