active record question

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have three models, Question, Response and User

User has many question, :through Responses

My response table has 3 main columns response, question_id and user_id.

The use case is lets say the user can respond to 100 question, but during a session he responds to 20. How do I find out the ones he has not respondeded to. In this case the response table will have 20 records and I woukd like to show the user the rest of the 80 he has not responded to.

Thanks

2

You could either use the find_by_sql method or the :joins method. (As someone has stated earlier that avoid find_by_sql for performance and maintanence reasons)

sample sql to put in find_by_sql in your model

select question_id from responses r1 where not exists (select question_id from question q )

using :joins. (probably this would be better )

questions.find( :joins => "LEFT OUTER JOIN responses ON question_id = responses.question_id" :conditions => "responses.id is null")

gurus, please comment on this.

thanks, radha.

badnaam wrote:

3

If your models are set up correctly you can do '@user.questions' for the collection. You can set up a method or named_scope maybe on the user model:

def needed_questions   self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all end

something like that.

4

I come from a db world. Can someone interpret this please, "self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all" I'm overwhelmed by the syntax in the second line, "self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all"

def needed_questions   self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all end

something like that.

i can somewhat understand self.questions.... but after that it is way over my head. I just completed reading "Simply Rails2" book and thought i could understand.. but this line is "self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all" is complicated.

Please help.

thanks, radha

Chris Habgood wrote:

5

RailsFan Radha wrote:

I come from a db world. Can someone interpret this please, "self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all" I'm overwhelmed by the syntax in the second line, "self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all"

Go look up the relevant functions (especially reject) in the documentation. Also read the section on blocks in Programming Ruby or other similar book. If you still have questions after reading those, please ask. This is fairly basic Ruby stuff, and you need to know it to be able to work with Rails.

6

this explains what ".reject" does:

So essentially, the line takes the collection of questions that self has, and gets rid of those that are nil (fairly self-explanatory if you just read the line out loud to yourself :wink: TBH, I think the "all" at the end is a syntax error - Array doesn't have a .all method, although I'm not at a Ruby console to check.

7

For what it's worth, reject{|q| q.nil?} is the same as compact

Fred

8

... if the collection is an Array. Without more context, I don't know if that's so. The compact method is on that, not Enumerable.

-Dave

9

Thanks michael. the link helps to understand .reject. thanks again

To get a clear pic, is the .all here truely a syntax error or typo or is it correct?

"self.questions.reject{|q| q.nil?}.all"

can anyone clarify.

- thanks, radha.

Michael Pavling wrote:

10

Again, without more context, I can't tell, but it looks like an ActiveRecord thing to me. It's very common to have a WhateverController's index method do something like "@whatevers = Whatever.all(:order => :name)", when class Whatever inherits from ActiveRecord::Base.

-Dave