With the release of Rails 7.2, a new change was introduced to the way ActiveRecord models are inspected in the Rails console. Prior to this version, calling inspect on an ActiveRecord model instance would display all the model's attributes by default. However, in Rails 7.2, the default behavior was modified to only show the model's ID when inspect is called. This change aims to improve performance, especially in production environments where large object inspections can become a bottleneck.

For many developers, this change was unexpected and led to confusion and inconvenience. IMO, they should show all attributes by default and let the developer specify which attributes should be hidden. But they did the opposite.

See details in this PR: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/49765

Fortunately, there's an easy way to revert to the previous behavior and display all attributes of a model when calling inspect. By adding a single line of configuration to your ApplicationRecord, you can ensure that all attributes are shown.

// language: ruby
class ApplicationRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
  primary_abstract_class

  # Ensure all attributes are shown when calling inspect in Rails console
  self.attributes_for_inspect = :all
end

If you need more granular control, you can override this setting on a per-model basis. For example, you want to display only some attributes for model User, you can set:

// language: ruby
class User < ApplicationRecord
  self.attributes_for_inspect = [:id, :total, :status]
end

Please consider your environment and performance implications when making this change, and customize it as needed for your specific use case.

Happy coding!