Querying Records

We can also look up records from the database using our Active Record model.

To find all the Product records in the database, we can use the all method. This is a class method, which is why we can use it on Product (versus an instance method that we would call on the product instance, like save above).

store(dev)> Product.all
  Product Load (0.1ms)  SELECT "products".* FROM "products" /* loading for pp */ LIMIT 11 /*application='Store'*/
=> [#<Product:0x0000000121845158 id: 1, name: "T-Shirt", created_at: "2024-11-09 16:35:01.117836000 +0000", updated_at: "2024-11-09 16:35:01.117836000 +0000">,
 #<Product:0x0000000121845018 id: 2, name: "Pants", created_at: "2024-11-09 16:36:01.856751000 +0000", updated_at: "2024-11-09 16:36:01.856751000 +0000">]

This generates a SELECT SQL query to load all records from the products table. Each record is automatically converted into an instance of our Product Active Record model so we can easily work with them from Ruby.

TIP: The all method returns an ActiveRecord::Relation object which is an Array-like collection of database records with features to filter, sort, and execute other database operations.