I'll need to investigate this more, but we just ran in to an issue with some preloads.

Take this model setup

class User < BaseModel
  table do
    # ...
    column soft_deleted_at : Time?
    has_many transactions : Transaction
  end
end

class Transaction < BaseModel
  table do
    belongs_to user : User
  end
end

class User::BaseQuery
  include Avram::SoftDelete::Query

  def initialize
    defaults &.only_kept
  end
end

class UserQuery < User::BaseQuery
end

class TransactionQuery < Transaction::BaseQuery
end

Then we had some code like this:

# in the action
transactions = TransactionQuery.new.preload_user

# in the page

transactions.each do |transaction|
  td do
    link(transaction.user.username, to: Users::Show.with(transaction.user_id))
  end
end

We kept getting a 500 error saying NilAssertionError which generally relates to calling not_nil! somewhere. In this case, our user should never be nil, but calling transaction.user says otherwise. We printed out the record, and saw this:

#<Transaction:0x7f9cdd05a8f0 @_user_preloaded=true, @_preloaded_user=nil, @id=1, @created_at=2021-04-28 18:02:47.0 UTC, @updated_at=2021-04-28 18:02:47.0 UTC, @user_id=4>

Looking up user 4, we saw the record existed, but it was soft deleted.

Avram should probably log some sort of warning that a required record could not be preloaded, or maybe when you preload an association that's been soft deleted, that record isn't returned at all?