Selecting conditionally from HABTM

Rails
1

Hello,
I was wondering whether there is a nice Rubyesque way of selecting
from a pair of HABTM models where one of them is inherited from
another object.

Here is the situation:

I have a ‘posts’ table from which ‘replies’ and ‘articles’ are
inherited. Articles have_and_belong_to_many categories, but neither
posts nor replies do (it just does not seem to be very useful). I want
to have a page which shows (paginatedly) the articles in a selected
category. So given a category, I would like to return an array of all
of the articles associated with it.

I am no master of SQL syntax, so I am not sure what to include in a
'LEFT JOIN" statement.

Thanks for any help,

Daniel H.

2

Daniel,

Maybe I’m not understanding the problem correctly, but if you are
using single-table inheritance (ie a ‘posts’ table with a ‘type’
column that would either be ‘Post’, ‘Reply’, or ‘Article’) you can
grab the articles associated with a selected category simply through:

@category_object.articles.

In other words, you can refer directly to the Article class.

  • Derek

On 1/2/06, Daniel H. [email protected] wrote:

to have a page which shows (paginatedly) the articles in a selected
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3

That will give me the correct articles array, but how would I pass
that to a paginator? I have looked through the API docs and have not
been able to find any way to tell the paginator to operate just on a
certain array and not all Articles? It seems like there should just be
a :collection option to take an array and paginate that.

Any help is appreciated.

Daniel H.

4

Daniel,

How about:

@article_pages, @articles = paginate :articles, :per_page =>
10, :conditions => ‘category = category_name’

The :conditions option gets passed on to Article.find(), effectively
letting you specify the WHERE clause of the query it uses to get the
Articles for display. Not exactly the ‘paginate-an-arbitrary-array’
you’re looking for, I know, but if I understand what you’re trying to
do, this should be an option for you.

Does that help?

David