Why Does Rails 7 Only Display the ID Attribute in Active Record Inspect?

This change in output is intentional and is due to an update in how Active Record’s inspect method works in Rails 7. Rather than eagerly showing every attribute when you inspect a record, Rails now only displays the attributes that have already been loaded—usually just the primary key (id). This approach helps avoid unintended database queries when printing out an object, especially if it might trigger a connection when attributes aren’t yet loaded.

If you want to see all the attributes, you can still call .attributes explicitly. There isn’t a configuration option under config.active_record to revert this behavior. If a different inspect output is required, you could override the inspect method in your model.

For example, if you’d like to customize inspection for a specific model, you might do something like:

RUBYCopied
class MyFancyModel < ApplicationRecord
  def inspect
    "#<#{self.class} #{attributes.inspect}>"
  end
end

This will force the full attributes to be printed whenever you inspect an instance of MyFancyModel. However, keep in mind that overriding inspect may lead to unintended side effects if your object isn’t fully loaded.