After loading model, can it be again accessed without SQL

Rails
1

Quick question:

1 User -> many Accounts

If I eager load the user with: my_user = User.find(:first, include =>
[:accounts])

How can I then use criteria to work with the “accounts” without making
another query to the database?

Iteration is one option, but it would be best to avoid it if say I
wanted one of the accounts in the user by :name => “Checking Account”.

Thanks a lot of any advice.

Kendall B.

2

Iteration is one option, but it would be best to avoid it if
say I wanted one of the accounts in the user by :name =>
“Checking Account”.

I don’t think you can. However, you might be able to do it another way.
If you know before the load which one account you want to look at, you
could do:

User.find(:first, :include=>[:accounts], :conditions=>[‘accounts.name =
?’, ‘Checking Account’])

perhaps a bit less efficient than including the condition in the JOIN
itself, but it ought to work. Note that this will only work properly if
you’re only :including one relationship with many entities.

An alternate solution might be to include the condition in a manual
join:

User.find(:first, :joins=>'LEFT OUTER JOIN accounts on accounts.user_id
= users.id AND accounts.name = ‘Checking Account’)

then the account properties will appear on the user object, but I dunno
what will happen if the user and account objects share any property
names, nor do I know if the automatic sql type->ruby type mappings will
occur as usual.

  • donald
3

from what i know that’s no problem at all ?!? that’s the whole point
of eager loading…

@user = User.find(:first, include => [:accounts])

@user.accounts.find(blablaba-)
@user.accounts.each do { |account| blablabla }
@user.accounts.count

these and more will workwithout re-querying the database. basically
any AR method you use on @user.accounts won’t hit the database, except
for updating/adding/removing an account, of course.

On 16 Apr., 18:35, “Ball, Donald A Jr (Library)”

4

the database, except for updating/adding/removing an account,
of course.

My understand was that he was trying to query the eagerly loaded user’s
accounts using SQL conditions, which AFAIK you cannot do without
requerying the database. Sure, you can iterate through and find the
account named ‘Checking Account’, but it’s probably faster to have the
database do the work for you.

For a handful of accounts and a simple criteria like this, it’s almost
certainly 6 == 1/2 dozen and I’d probably do it all in ruby for clarity,
but if there are many children and complex criteria, I’d do it in SQL.

  • donald