Question

I have a very simple model like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :cookies
    has_many :fortunes, :through => :cookies
end

class Cookie < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :user
    belongs_to :fortune
end

class Fortune < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :cookies
    has_many :users, :through => :cookies
end

For a given user, u, I can do

u.fortunes 

This will give me all the fortunes associated with this user via Cookies table. What I want to do is get all Fortunes not returned by u.fortunes.

I tried

Fortune.all(:limit => 5, :conditions => {:user => {:id._ne => u.id} })

but that doesn’t work :(. I am new to ActiveRecord.

Thanks

Answer 1

Or try this

Fortune.includes(:cookies).limit(5).where([ 'cookies.user_id != ? OR cookies.user_id IS NULL', u.id ])

Or with the syntax You use

Fortune.all(:include => :cookies, :limit => 5, :conditions => [ 'cookies.user_id != ? OR cookies.user_id IS NULL', u.id ])

The reason to not use include :users is to avoid one extra join.

EDIT:
The other suggestions are shorter, and I think also a little bit quicker when finding (no joins), I only wanted to show how to use associations.