Comments on: Random Records in Rails http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/ A chess-playing machine of the late 18th century, promoted as an automaton but later proved a hoax. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:56:56 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: madmaurice http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-609 Mon, 12 Dec 2011 01:22:48 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-609 what about <Model>.all.order("RAND()").first for MySQL based databases :)

]]> By: britt http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-608 Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:18:01 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-608 I like Gordy's approach best!

]]> By: Chris http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-607 Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:17:17 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-607 The bottom of my message looks foobar-ed.

1) RANDOM() for postges. I prefer postges

2) conditions created_at < Time.now SHOULD make sure DB caching will not mess with you, (the SQL will be different on every call)

3) *args used so that the value it optional (for people not using Ruby 1.9 yet.)

]]> By: Chris http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-606 Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:11:29 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-606 If you are wooried about caching couldn't you add a simple date into the lookup?

named_scope :random, lambda { |*args| {:order => "RANDOM()", :limit => (args.first || 1), :conditions => ["created_at < ?", Time.now.utc] }}

changes:

1) (postgres uses random() not rand(), so I changed it to random())

2) conditions created_at RANDOM(). that really helped me finish this in my project. :)

]]> By: Damir http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-605 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:47:47 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-605 How about this:

@posts = Post.find(:all).sort_by{rand}

]]> By: Ruby on Rails: Get some random records | David Lowry http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-604 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:04:52 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-604 [...] from a baseline of the code found here at almosteffortless.com I’ve extended a ‘random record grabber’ to get a specific number of unique [...]

]]> By: Glenn http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-603 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:58:01 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-603 Dan has a cool use of named_scopes, but unfortunately I think the caching system might come up to bite you. If you ask for Article.random(1) twice for instance, I believe it returns the same record.

]]> By: Dan http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-602 Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:10:25 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-602 I use a named_scope:

named_scope :random, lambda { |random| {:order => "RAND()", :limit => random }}

Article.random(4) would return 4 random objects

]]> By: itchy http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-601 Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:44:08 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-601 To add to Benson's short solution, I needed to scope by "active = 1", so:

named_scope :active, :conditions => {:active => true}

def self.random

self.active.find(:first, :o rder => 'RAND()')

end

]]> By: Benson http://trevorturk.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-600 Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:01:15 +0000 http://almosteffortless.com/2007/12/04/random-records-in-rails/#comment-600 Found this in another forum:

def self.random

find(:first, :o rder => "RAND()")

end

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