Just wanted to say rails 3 active relation can be rather great!

Here’s a query I just built as I build my application and learn rails:

def self.views
sorted
.select(“help_categories.id, help_categories.name,
COUNT(help_documents.id) AS number_of_documents”)
.joins(“left outer join help_documents on help_categories.id =
help_documents.category_id”)
.group(:id)
.group(:name)
end

I just want to say that this query works and is so much more straight-
forward compared to using Hibernate. In the Hibernate world, you first
have to make a static class to store id, name and the
number_of_documents… and the query and boiler plate is immense:

public List<HelpCategoryView> findAllViews() {
    return getHibernateTemplate().executeFind(new

HibernateCallback<List>() {
@Override
public List doInHibernate(Session
session) throws HibernateException, SQLException {
Query query = session.createQuery(
“select new
trainingdividend.domain.sysadmin.HelpCategoryView(” +
" helpCategory.id, helpCategory.name,
count(helpDocument)) " +
"from HelpCategory helpCategory " +
" left join helpCategory.documents helpDocument
" +
"group by helpCategory.id, helpCategory.name " +
“order by helpCategory.name asc”
);

            return query.list();
        }
    });
}

So congrats!