Question

I’m currently beginning to learn Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework. I’ve found that in the table records, I can find a record with an id of 5 and delete it by using the following code:

Record.find(5).destroy

This makes sense- I chain methods to find the record and destroy it. However, if I want to destroy all the records in the table, the logical command would be the following, as the all selector selects all the records in the table:

Record.all.destroy

And this returns a NoMethodError! I am aware that I can use Record.destroy_all or Record.delete_all to accomplish this task, however, I’d like to know why I can’t just use the most logical choice instead of having to look up things like delete_all. I am new to this framework, so it’s entirely possible that I’m missing something fundamental here.

Thanks for any answers in advance.

Answer 1

It was a design decision. DataMapper took your approach. Being forced to write destroy_all explicitly can be tedious but will also prevent you from doing something you really don’t want (i.e. delete everything in a table, like x = User; ...; x.destroy).