Question

I would like to have a method called feed in my User model that returns all the entries from two tables (discussions, exchanges).

In User.rb

 def feed
    SELECT * FROM discussions, exchanges GROUP BY created_at
 end

This doesn’t work, i get a problem in rails console

 syntax error, unexpected ';', expecting '='

Can anyone show me how to write SQL in here? Basically I want to return and sort entries from two different tables..

Answer 1

if you want actual ActiveRecord objects you can try the following

def feed
  exchanges = Exchange.all
  discussions = Discussion.all

  (exchanges + discussions).sort! { |a, b| a.created_at <=> b.created_at }
end

this is quite ineffective, as the sorting could be done in sql, but ActiveRecord cannot instantiate records selected from different tables (you can somehow override this by using STI)