Rails - Sep 2005 - Alternative for using find with joins?

Hi,

I have a data structure similar to the following: Father has many  
Children, and Mother has many Children. When I load a Father, I  
immediately get access to his Children, but I cannot reach the Mother  
directly. I''ve solved this in two ways:

1) Load the Mother separately using the mother_id stored in a Child
2) Load the Mother together with a Child using the :joins parameter  
to the find function

Both of them work fine, but I''m not very satisfied with them. Option  
1) needs an extra database query (even though it''s pretty basic),  
while 2) results in pretty ugly and fragile code. However, I can''t  
find any clues of another solution, not even in the "Agile Web  
Development with Rails"  book.

Is there a better way to solve this, or am I limited to the above  
options? Thanks in advance,

Jeroen Heijmans

I have not used it, but acts_as_tree sounds like a good fit:

http://ar.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Acts/Tree/ClassMethods.html

In your case, it would be a family tree :)

Tom

On 9/21/05, Jeroen Heijmans
<rails-navLQF7bQP5WbXBheyDZMNBPR1lH4CV8@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a data structure similar to the following: Father has many
> Children, and Mother has many Children. When I load a Father, I
> immediately get access to his Children, but I cannot reach the Mother
> directly. I''ve solved this in two ways:
>
> 1) Load the Mother separately using the mother_id stored in a Child
> 2) Load the Mother together with a Child using the :joins parameter
> to the find function
>
> Both of them work fine, but I''m not very satisfied with them.
Option
> 1) needs an extra database query (even though it''s pretty basic),
> while 2) results in pretty ugly and fragile code. However, I can''t
> find any clues of another solution, not even in the "Agile Web
> Development with Rails"  book.
>
> Is there a better way to solve this, or am I limited to the above
> options? Thanks in advance,
>
> Jeroen Heijmans
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> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
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>