ActiveRecord.find results as array of arrays

Rails
1

Howdy. I imagine this is an elementary Ruby question, but I’d love to
learn the right Ruby idiom for this.

I’d like to take the results of an ActiveRecord.find() and turn them
into an array of arrays [[item1_col1,item1_col2], [item2_col1,
item2_col2]].

Here’s my code sample of the brute force way I’m doing it, but I bet
it can be reduced fewer lines of code…

@crit_sections = Hash.new
x = Reference.find(
  :all,
  :select => "refid,name",
  :conditions => "ref_type = 'Division'",
  :order => "name")

ar = []
x.each do |xi|
  ar.push([xi.refid, xi.name])
end
@crit_sections["division"] = ar

Much thanks!
Michael

2

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 9:08 AM, michael_teter [email protected]
wrote:

@crit_sections = Hash.new
x = Reference.find(
:all,
:select => “refid,name”,
:conditions => “ref_type = ‘Division’”,
:order => “name”)

You can use the collect method

@crit_sections[:division] = Reference.find(:all,
:select =>
“refid,name”,

:conditions => “ref_type = ‘Division’”,
:order =>
“name”).collect { |r| [ r.refid, r.name ] }

I took the liberty of using a symbol for your hash key instead of a
string.
Read up on symbols - in simplest terms, they are like strings without
all
the string functionality, which we usually don’t need anyway for hash
keys.

3

That’s exactly what I was after. I knew it was possible, but I was
missing “collect” :slight_smile:

As for symbols, at one point I used them a lot, but then I ran into
some places that seemed to really want strings. Out of confusion, I
stopped using symbols in a lot of cases. I will re-evaluate where I’m
using strings though.

Thanks!