Rails Associations has_one Latest Record

Question

I have the following model:

class Section < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :page
  has_many :revisions, :class_name => \'SectionRevision\', :foreign_k         


        

Answer 1

I understand you want to get the sections where the last revision of each section has a parent_section_id = 1;

I have a similar situation, first, this is the SQL (please think the categories as sections for you, posts as revisions and user_id as parent_section_id -sorry if I don't move the code to your need but I have to go):

SELECT categories.*, MAX(posts.id) as M
FROM `categories` 
INNER JOIN `posts` 
ON `posts`.`category_id` = `categories`.`id` 
WHERE `posts`.`user_id` = 1
GROUP BY posts.user_id
having M = (select id from posts where category_id=categories.id order by id desc limit 1)

And this is the query in Rails:

Category.select("categories.*, MAX(posts.id) as M").joins(:posts).where(:posts => {:user_id => 1}).group("posts.user_id").having("M = (select id from posts where category_id=categories.id order by id desc limit 1)")

This works, it is ugly, I think the best way is to "cut" the query, but if you have too many sections that would be a problem while looping trough them; you can also place this query into a static method, and also, your first idea, have a revision_id inside of your sections table will help to optimize the query, but will drop normalization (sometimes it is needed), and you will have to be updating this field when a new revision is created for that section (so if you are going to be making a lot of revisions in a huge database it maybe would be a bad idea if you have a slow server...)

UPDATE I'm back hehe, I was making some tests, and check this out:

def last_revision
    revisions.last
end

def self.last_sections_for(parent_section_id)
  ids = Section.includes(:revisions).collect{ |c| c.last_revision.id rescue nil }.delete_if {|x| x == nil}

  Section.select("sections.*, MAX(revisions.id) as M")
         .joins(:revisions)
         .where(:revisions => {:parent_section_id => parent_section_id})
         .group("revisions.parent_section_id")
         .having("M IN (?)", ids)
end

I made this query and worked with my tables (hope I named well the params, it is the same Rails query from before but I change the query in the having for optimization); watch out the group; the includes makes it optimal in large datasets, and sorry I couldn't find a way to make a relation with has_one, but I would go with this, but also reconsider the field that you mention at the beginning.