count

Count operates using three different approaches.

• Count all: By not passing any parameters to count, it will return a count of all the rows for the model.
• Count by conditions or joins: This API has been deprecated and will be removed in Rails 2.0
• Count using options will find the row count matched by the options used.

The last approach, count using options, accepts an option hash as the only parameter. The options are:

• :conditions: An SQL fragment like "administrator = 1" or [ "user_name = ?", username ]. See conditions in the intro.
• :joins: An SQL fragment for additional joins like "LEFT JOIN comments ON comments.post_id = id". (Rarely needed). The records will be returned read-only since they will have attributes that do not correspond to the table’s columns.
• :include: Named associations that should be loaded alongside using LEFT OUTER JOINs. The symbols named refer to already defined associations. When using named associations count returns the number DISTINCT items for the model you’re counting. See eager loading under Associations.
• :order: An SQL fragment like "created_at DESC, name" (really only used with GROUP BY calculations).
• :group: An attribute name by which the result should be grouped. Uses the GROUP BY SQL-clause.
• :select: By default, this is * as in SELECT * FROM, but can be changed if you for example want to do a join, but not include the joined columns.
• :distinct: Set this to true to make this a distinct calculation, such as SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT posts.id) …

Examples for counting all:

  Person.count         # returns the total count of all people

Examples for count by conditions and joins (this has been deprecated):

  Person.count("age > 26")  # returns the number of people older than 26
  Person.find("age > 26 AND job.salary > 60000", "LEFT JOIN jobs on jobs.person_id = person.id") # returns the total number of rows matching the conditions and joins fetched by SELECT COUNT(*).

Examples for count with options:

  Person.count(:conditions => "age > 26")
  Person.count(:conditions => "age > 26 AND job.salary > 60000", :include => :job) # because of the named association, it finds the DISTINCT count using LEFT OUTER JOIN.
  Person.count(:conditions => "age > 26 AND job.salary > 60000", :joins => "LEFT JOIN jobs on jobs.person_id = person.id") # finds the number of rows matching the conditions and joins.
  Person.count('id', :conditions => "age > 26") # Performs a COUNT(id)
  Person.count(:all, :conditions => "age > 26") # Performs a COUNT(*) (:all is an alias for '*')

Note: Person.count(:all) will not work because it will use :all as the condition. Use Person.count instead.