Select some columns only when doing "find"

Rails
1

Hi,

I love ActiveRecord and its simplicity.

Person.find(1)

It’s so simple but imagine if the table people has 30 columns and there
are some columns with type ‘bytea’ (or large object / binary data)
holding MB-s data, then you only need three columns only with type
‘string’, ‘string’, ‘int’. It’s a waste of time using that code. So you
use:

Person.find_by_sql( “select name, id, body from people” );

But you lose safety (from sql injection) and simplicity of ActiveRecord.

So I wonder if there is plugin or a way so you can write the query like
this:

Person.find(1, [ ‘name’, ‘id’, ‘body’ ])

Thank you.

2

On Dec 2, 2006, at 23:17 , Akbar H. wrote:

Person.find_by_sql( “select name, id, body from people” );

But you lose safety (from sql injection) and simplicity of
ActiveRecord.

You only lose safety if you’re interpolating user-submitted data that
you haven’t adequately filtered.

So I wonder if there is plugin or a way so you can write the query
like
this:

Person.find(1, [ ‘name’, ‘id’, ‘body’ ])

Not exactly what you want, but you can do:

id = 1
sql = <<SQL
select name, id, body
from people
where id = :id
SQL
Person.find_by_sql([sql, { :id => id }]).first

Michael G.
grzm seespotcode net

3

find takes a select option, eg
p = Person.find 1, :select => ‘id, name, address’

If you don’t include id, strange things may happen later down the road
(eg if you try to reload or save the object.

Fred