You may be aware of the uniq method in Ruby:
[1,2,3,4,4,6,2].uniq => [1,2,3,4,6]
This does not work for arrays of ActiveRecord objects, especially if you want uniqueness on a arbitrary property. Here’s a snippet that allows you to uniquify an Array using an arbitrary property:
Hash[*arrayname.map {|obj| [obj.name, obj]}.flatten].values
Basically you create a new Hash, using the unique value as the key and the actual object as value. Then you convert the Hash#values back to an Array.
