ActiveRecordExplainInEnglish

ActiveRecordExplainInEnglish adds explain_in_english to ActiveRecord::Relation.

It describes the shape of an ActiveRecord query in plain English by walking the Arel nodes behind the relation. This is useful when you want to show, log, or teach what a query is asking for without showing raw SQL.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "active_record_explain_in_english", "~> 0.1.0"

And then execute:

bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

gem install active_record_explain_in_english

Call explain_in_english on any ActiveRecord relation:

User.all.explain_in_english
# => "Find users"

User.where(active: true).explain_in_english
# => "Find users, where active is true"

User.where(age: 18..65)
    .order(created_at: :desc)
    .limit(10)
    .offset(5)
    .explain_in_english
# => "Find users, where age is between 18 and 65, ordered by created at descending, limited to 10, offset by 5"

It also handles common relation clauses:

User.joins(:posts).where(posts: { published: true }).explain_in_english
# => "Find users, joined to posts, where published is true"

The first release supports:

• bare relations
• where equality, inequality, ranges, arrays, not, or, and raw SQL fragments
• order, including hash/symbol orders and raw SQL order strings
• limit and offset
• select, distinct, aliases, aggregate functions, and named functions
• joins and left_joins
• group and having

After checking out the repo, run:

bin/setup
bundle exec rspec

You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/jonathangrinstead/active_record_explain_in_english.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.