[adamzapasnik]

This is what I struggle a lot with in Rails.

No good, community backed serialisation gem. AMS is a mess, other ones are not maintained. And I'm not a fan of JSON api spec's serialisation either.

But also AR doesn't have any easy tools to construct complex queries/multi queries. It works for basic and medium stuff, but even this very common count problem is a disaster to deal with. Sure. you can use Arel and some other gems, but these aren't good solutions for someone that wants to get things done. Makes me wonder how others deal with these problems tbh.

[bhaak]

IME if ActiveRecord is not sufficient, you go directly to SQL.

find_by_sql gives you enough freedom to get everything out of the db into a ActiveModel object.

[jbverschoor]

bs, there are a few very good serialization gems. ActiveRecord and Hibernate/JPA work a lot better than concatenating your own SQL strings.

If there's something that really doesn't benefit from your model (reports), then you'd fallback to either SQL, or still use ActiveModel + the aggregates

[adamzapasnik]

Please list the good serialisation gems, as I can't find any ;)

What if you have a complex/dynamic query, how do you build it? You said yourself that AR works better than concatenating SQL strings, but AR doesn't even support CTEs atm and building complex queries is not trivial and sometimes even possible without just SQL strings...

[rurabe]

Big fan of raw sql, but practically speaking (as it relates to developing with rails) CTEs can be rewritten as subqueries, the advantage being that they are linear instead of nested in SQL.

With AR queries you can do the same and make it linear in ruby (and then the computer doesn't really care if your sql is nested)

    last_three_posts = Post.limit(3).order(created_at: :desc)
    @posts = Comment.where(post_id: last_three_posts)

[rurabe]

It's not perfect or painless but I think jsonapi-serializer is pretty good