Question

I’m trying to sort column Foo that has one Bar. Currently, I’m using a join so that in the foos#index action is ordered by bars.name*:

@foos = Foo.joins(:bar).order("bars.name")

The problem is, not all foos have a bar, and it seems as though this join ignores any Foo with no Bar. I don’t want these records ignored. Is there a way to do this?

*For the record, I’m using will_paginate, so the index action actually includes:

@foos = Foo.joins(:bar).paginate :page => params[:page], :order => "bars.name"

Answer 1

You need to use SQL LEFT JOIN in your joins statement. This will fetch all Foos (with Foos that have Bars)
To use ‘Rails way’ you can wrap it into the scope:

scope :some_scope_name, joins("LEFT JOIN bars ON foos.id = bars.foo_id")