Difference between #all and #to_a

[burlesona]

I couldn't find any documentation around using #to_a on datasets, but in practice it appeared that #to_a and #all were the same. However, today I ran into a case where, after using #eager_graph, #all returns model instances, but #to_a returns hashes.

Is there any documentation on using #to_a versus #all and what the expected behavior is for each?

I actually couldn't find any documentation of #to_a, so I am assuming that this is actually just the ruby core method being used on an enumerable and thus the behavior may be inconsistent - thus we should always prefer using the #all method. Is that correct?

[jeremyevans]

to_a comes from Enumerable, which Dataset includes. The eager loading documentation mentions that you must use all to get eager loading to work. all is basically to_a; post_load; each(&block) if block. post_load here is a private method that handles the eager loading. In general, it's probably best to use Dataset#all and not Dataset#to_a