[cam]

Hey, quick question regarding joining while using ActiveRecord's find method:

If i have the following models setup:

Course
- has_many :course_dates

CourseDate
- belongs_to :course
- has_one :venue

Venue
- belongs_to :course_date

Is there any way to get Rails to automatically join all three tables using find without having to explicitly write the SQL join syntax? The following will work, but I can't see any way to connect the venue table as well (which is related to course dates, not the course itself).

# Return any special offers
def special_offers
@special_offers = Course.find(
:all,
:select => "courses.id, courses.name",
:include => [:course_dates],
:conditions => ["courses.active = true AND courses.special = false"])
end

Cheers for any help - just thought I'd ask before resorting to writing the SQL.

[Luke Redpath]

Well, with a normal find, there isn't anything stopping you from doing the following to get at a venue:

some_course.course_data.venue

So I assume you are trying to do some kind of eager loading to reduce the number of queries?

You could try this change to your course model:

class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :course_dates, :include => :venue

Then when loading courses, specify :include => :course_dates as normal.

[cam]

Hi Luke, cheers for the reply. Yes, I'm trying to reduce the number of queries necessary. Tried the change you suggested but it didn't seem to have the desired effect. Having the join written explicitly isn't too big a deal, so i'll use that for now.

Originally Posted by Luke Redpath

Well, with a normal find, there isn't anything stopping you from doing the following to get at a venue:

some_course.course_data.venue

So I assume you are trying to do some kind of eager loading to reduce the number of queries?

You could try this change to your course model:

class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :course_dates, :include => :venue

Then when loading courses, specify :include => :course_dates as normal.