How can I get SQL statement created by ActiveRecord#find without actually executing it?

Question

I am using will_paginate with some complicated queries and it is unable to correctly calculate number of total records (in order to display proper number of pag

Answer 1

Unfortunately in Rails 2.x this is actually quite hard. I've posted a similar question on Stack Overflow before and ended up digging deep into the source code of Rails to find a way. It just isn't architected in a way to allow this.

What I ended up doing was running the query in a transaction that I rolled back, and for the length of the transaction setting the logger to my own StringIO object that I could read after.

This is from memory but hopefully you understand it enough to adjust it if it doesn't work:

Model.transaction do 
  Model.logger = str = StringIO.new
  Model.complex_scope.chained_complex_scope
  Model.logger = ActiveRecord::Base.logger
  str.rewind
  str = str.read

  # perform some regex on str to get the actual query

  raise ActiveRecord::Rollback
end

It is ugly as hell and I never liked it (I wrapped it in a sql { Model. complex_scope.chained_complex_scope }) but it kinda worked for me (I only used it in development though, so I had some tolerance for errors)