Question

I am using ActiveRecord in Rails 3 to pull data from two different tables in two different databases. These databases can not join on each other, but I have the need to do a simple join after-the-fact. I would like to preserve the relation so that I can chain it down the line.

here is a simplified version of what I am doing

browsers = Browser.all # <-- this is fairly small and can reside in memory
events = Event.where(:row_date=>Date.today).select(:name, :browser_id)

So as you can see, I want to join browsers in on the events relation, where browser_id should equal browsers.name. events is a relation and I can still add clauses to it down the line, so I dont want to run the query on the db just yet. How would I accomplish this?

Edit

For those that would like to see some code for the answer I accepted below, here is what I came up with:

class EventLog < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :browser

  def get_todays_events
    Event.where(:row_date=>Date.today).select(:name, :browser_id).includes(:browser)
  end
end

would let me get the browser name in the following manner

get_todays_events.browser.name

Answer 1

I would accomplish this by using an :include. Attempting to do this in Ruby will cause you nothing but grief. You can chain onto an include just fine.