Filter on a Related Table

Rails
1

I have an application with two related tables as follows

User
has_many :items

Item
belongs_to :user

The description of the item table includes the following columns:
user_id int not null,
itemDate date

For a view I want to retrieve a list of users with each user appearing
one time. For a given date, a user may or may not have any items. I want
to retrieve the items for that user that correspond to a given date.

I find that doing this and retrieving ALL the items for a given user
is quite easy. I don’t see a way to filter it down to just the items
that occurred on the given date. Do note: I need all the users whether
or not they had any items on that date.

I can write logic to do this, but doing that pretty much steps outside
the ActiveRecord relationships - or possibly bypasses them. Can anyone
offer any suggestions?

Thanks in advance
—Michael

2

Michael S. wrote:

itemDate date
I can write logic to do this, but doing that pretty much steps outside
the ActiveRecord relationships - or possibly bypasses them. Can anyone
offer any suggestions?

Thanks in advance
—Michael

This would be done best as separate queries. So, first get all your
users and then for each look up the items for the specific date. I’d
probably add an instance method to user to wrap this in, eg…

def items_for_date(date)
items.find(:all, :conditions => [‘item_date = ?’,date])
end

then as you loop through your users in the view, call
user.items_for_date(@date) on each when you’re ready for the items.

–
http://www.5valleys.com/

http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/8078