I had the same problem (and opinion), I wrote a plugin last year to
solve this issue, and called it virtual aliases.
I solved two issues with it:
1. make :select work even when eager loading (:include ); you can thus
limit the fields that are requested in the query ; objects are created
but fields not requested are not present in the object.
2. be able to specify conditions/order/group in a way that you can
access relations on ActiveRecord.
To extend your example (added country, and creator)
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
# Everybody has a home address
belongs_to :home_address,:class_name => 'Address', :foreign_key =>
'home_address_id'
# Everybody has a work address
belongs_to :work_address, :class_name => 'Address', :foreign_key
=> 'work_address_id'
# Only some people have a second work address
belongs_to :work_address_2, :class_name => 'Address', :foreign_key
=> 'work_address_2_id'
belongs_to :creator, : class_name => 'User'
end
class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :creator, : class_name => 'User'
belongs_to :country
# street_no (string)
# street_name (string)
end
class Country
belongs_to :creator, : class_name => 'User'
# name
end
These will all work and do the necessary joins automatically :
Person.find(:all, :include => :valiases, :conditions =>
"{work_address.country.name} = 'Belgium' ", :order =>
"{home_address.street_name}" )
Person.find(:all, :include => :valiases, :conditions =>
"{work_address.creator.name} = 'bduc ", :order =>
"{home_address.country.creator.name}" )
All valiases are placed between curly braces and replaced by the
correct real aliases activerecord makes up for then.
Currently used and tested on rails 2.2
The code is at dev.dyndaco.com ; but you cannot checkout the code yet;
only view it (will make checkout available later this month).
There currently is not much documentation and there are no tests
included; that's way I don't make to much fuss about it.
Apart from that , it works great !
If you're intrested let me know.
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