Betternestedset talk - Aug 2007 - eager loading of associations by full_set

Hi,

Has anyone considered adding  functionality to the #full_set method
that would allow it to eager load associations? An example
implementation would be this:

  # Returns itself and all nested children.
  # Pass :exclude => item, or id, or [items or id] to exclude one or
more items *and* all of their descendants.
  def full_set(special={})
    if special[:exclude]
      exclude_str = " AND NOT
(#{base_set_class.sql_for(special[:exclude])}) "
    elsif new_record? || self[right_col_name] - self[left_col_name] == 1
      return [self]
    end
    base_set_class.find(:all,
      :conditions => "#{scope_condition} #{exclude_str} AND
(#{left_col_name} BETWEEN #{self[left_col_name]} AND
#{self[right_col_name]})",
      :order => left_col_name,
      :include => special[:include])
  end

The the main difference in the above code is that it adds a :include
parameter to the finder call at the end of the method.

It would be used like this:

class Location < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_nested_set
has_many :buildings
end

all_locations = Location.root.full_set :include => :buildings
all_buildings = all_locations.collect {|l| l.buildings}

The point of it would be that you could, using the above example, get
a list of all buildings in a location with only one db access.


Anyone have any thoughts about something like this?

Brian