Auto-Exclude Parent Resource Includes to Prevent Bullet False Positives

[Paul-Bob]

A common example in our dummy app is Course, which has many Links.

The Links index table also shows the course that each link belongs to. For that reason, adding :course to self.includes on the Links resource is necessary.

However, when rendering a course show page, the has-many Links field renders the Links resource similarly to how it is rendered on the index page, but scoped to that course and with a few minor differences. One of those differences is that the parent course column is not rendered, since we are already on that course’s show view and it’s not necessary to display the course column again.

This makes the :course include unused in that context, but it is not recommended to remove it since it is required on the Links index page.

When using the bullet gem with logs enabled, it is impossible to get rid of all warnings. If we remove the include, we get a USE warning on the Links index. If we add the include, we get an AVOID warning when rendering the course show page and when the links from there are loaded.

Avo has mechanisms to detect this scenario and automatically exclude the parent record’s model from the includes array.

[Paul-Bob]

During today’s meeting (18/02/2026), we realized that there may be situations where auto-exclusion is not desired. For example, if a user is using :course in a computed field, the course field might not be displayed directly, but it is still required to compute and display data in that table. We should ensure that users are still able to explicitly force an include, even if it would normally be auto-excluded.