Retrieve a random record in a Rails application

Wednesday 4 November 2015

Sometimes, you don’t want to fetch the .last or .first record of a given model, but something at random. In ActiveRecord, there is nothing built in. Here is a simple concern you can add to your rails application to add this feature.

# app/models/concerns/randomable.rb
module Randomable
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  class_methods do
    def random(the_count = 1)
      records = offset(rand(count - the_count)).limit(the_count)
      the_count == 1 ? records.first : records
    end
  end
end

Then it’s very easy to use, just include the module in your model (can be used in several models at will!).

# app/models/book.rb
class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Randomable
end

As you can see, you can call .random without any arguments to fetch one record, or .random(count) with an integer argument to fetch an ActiveRecord::Relation of records.

$ bin/rails c
irb(main):051:0> Book.random
   (0.2ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "books"
  Book Load (0.2ms)  SELECT  "books".* FROM "books"  ORDER BY "books"."id" ASC LIMIT 1 OFFSET 88
=> #<Book id: 89, title: "Title 89", created_at: "2015-11-04 09:28:32", updated_at: "2015-11-04 09:28:32">
irb(main):052:0> Book.random(2)
   (0.1ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "books"
  Book Load (0.1ms)  SELECT  "books".* FROM "books" LIMIT 2 OFFSET 16
=> #<ActiveRecord::Relation [#<Book id: 17, title: "Title 17", created_at: "2015-11-04 09:28:32", updated_at: "2015-11-04 09:28:32">, #<Book id: 18, title: "Title 18", created_at: "2015-11-04 09:28:32", updated_at: "2015-11-04 09:28:32">]>

Enjoy querying randomly!