BigBinary Blog Rails 6.1 allows associations to support destroy_async option with dependent key

This blog is part of our Rails 6.1 series. In Rails 6.1, Rails will enqueue a background job to destroy associated records if dependent: :destroy_async is setup. Let’s consider the following example. class Team < ApplicationRecord has_many :players, dependent: :destroy_async end class Player < ApplicationRecord belongs_to :team end Now, if we call destroy method on an instance of class Team Rails would enqueue an asynchronous job to delete the associated players records. We can verify this asynchronous job with a following test case. class TeamTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase include ActiveJob::TestHelper test "destroying a record destroys the associations using a background job" do team = Team.create!(name: "Portugal", manager: "Fernando Santos") player1 = Player.new(name: "Bernardo Silva") player2 = Player.new(name: "Diogo Jota") team.players << [player1, player2] team.save! team.destroy assert_enqueued_jobs 1 assert_difference -> { Player.count }, -2 do perform_enqueued_jobs end end end Finished in 0.232213s, 4.3064 runs/s, 8.6128 assertions/s. 1 runs, 2 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips Alternatively, this enqueue behavior can also be demonstrated in rails console. irb(main):011:0> team.destroy TRANSACTION (0.1ms) begin transaction Player Load (0.6ms) SELECT "players".* FROM "players" WHERE "players"."team_id" = ? [["team_id", 6]] Enqueued ActiveRecord::DestroyAssociationAsyncJob (Job ID: 4df07c2d-f55b-48c9-8c20-545b086adca2) to Async(active_record_destroy) with arguments: {:owner_model_name=>"Team", :owner_id=>6, :association_class=>"Player", :association_ids=>[1, 2], :association_primary_key_column=>:id, :ensuring_owner_was_method=>nil} Performed ActiveRecord::DestroyAssociationAsyncJob (Job ID: 4df07c2d-f55b-48c9-8c20-545b086adca2) from Async(active_record_destroy) in 34.5ms Check out the pull request for more details.