After upgrading to Rails 2.3.4, Lazy Loaded attributes are never loaded. Broken?

I have an application that I started developing under 2.1 and have progressed through 2.2 and am no attempting to run using 2.3.4.

The application is heavily reliant on ActiveRecord and the ability to reference objects and attributes using dot notation.

eg:

if I have defined for class ARec     named_scope :for_period, lambda {|f,t| {:conditions => ['from_date between ? and ?', f,t]}}

I typically call:     from_date = ARec.for_period( c.d.e.from, f.g.h.i.to )

or similar within my code.

The problem is that under 2.2.2, c.d.e.from and f.g.h.i.to both loaded the values from the database as needed, whereas under 2.3.4, when I run the same code block, the from and to calls both get into AssociationProxy.load_target (association_proxy.rb : 237) and Rails determines that the instances have already been loaded, even though their attribute lists are nil.

The only solution I have found so far is to add a parameter of true to each object to force the loading. But I don't really want to do that to the over 10,000 places in my code where I may need to do this. What this really seems to indicate is that lazy loading of objects is broken in Rails 2.3.4 if AR is marking records as loaded when it hasn't loaded the attributes.

What can I do (short of going back to Rails 2.2.x) to get Lazy Loading working application wide for a system with over 400 separate models and over 20,000 lines of code in my models?

I have an application that I started developing under 2.1 and have progressed through 2.2 and am no attempting to run using 2.3.4.

The application is heavily reliant on ActiveRecord and the ability to reference objects and attributes using dot notation.

I think that applies to most applications and is something that should just work. Have you tried boiling down your problem to an example small enough to post here ?

Fred

I am trying to narrow this down as much as possible. The problem is that it's so prevalent that I have dome the following:

Assuming the ARec from above contains a has_one relationship to a Location such that ARec.location is the related location.

In my code, I have the ARec loaded and I want to get the Location. So I do the following:

loc = ARec.location( true )

the result is a Location object in loc with @attributes, @attributes_cache, and all records related to the Location class set to nil.

I have created a small project (using NetBeans 6.8, Ruby 1.8.7, and Rails 2.3.4) which shows the failure when you run "rake test:units"

loc = ARec.location( true )

the result is a Location object in loc with @attributes, @attributes_cache, and all records related to the Location class set to nil.

I have created a small project (using NetBeans 6.8, Ruby 1.8.7, and Rails 2.3.4) which shows the failure when you run "rake test:units"

What does the code for that project look like ?

Fred