# Association to return only the first of an associated list **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [December 8, 2008, 11:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/association-to-return-only-the-first-of-an-associated-list/155120 "2008-12-08T11:59:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![cmaxvv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/85f322/32.png) [@cmaxvv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cmaxvv)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/association-to-return-only-the-first-of-an-associated-list/155120/1 "2008-12-08T11:59:17Z")
A little background: in our schema, Resource has\_many :assets, through a join table called items. Whenever we show a resource, we also show a thumbnail for its first associated asset. Currently, this means that we’re doing a lot of sql action in the view: for example, a partial like this might be repeated 100 times: … \<% asset = resource.assets.first %\> \<%= image\_tag asset.name, asset.path %\> … Obviously doing loads of little queries in the view isn’t good: what i’d like to do is somehow eager-load that first asset with the include option. We tried making a method called ‘primary\_asset’ which returns the first asset for a resource, but that can’t be "include"d: i think that in order to include it i need to set it up as an association. Which leads me to my actual question: how do i set up a has\_one association to return only the first asset from the collection of associated assets? has\_one doesn’t seem to have an ‘sql’ option, otherwise i’d just do something like has\_one :primary\_asset, :class\_name =\> “Asset”, :sql =\> “SELECT assets.\* FROM assets INNER JOIN items ON assets.id = items.asset\_id WHERE ((items.resource\_id = #{id})) ORDER BY position LIMIT 1” Can anyone see how i can set this up? I’m using rails 2.0.2. thanks, max ---
**Author:** ![cmaxvv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/85f322/32.png) [@cmaxvv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cmaxvv)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 7:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/association-to-return-only-the-first-of-an-associated-list/155120/2 "2008-12-08T19:20:38Z")
Have you tried has\_one :primary\_asset, :class\_name=\>“Asset”, :order=\>“position” On Dec 8, 4:59 am, Max W. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)