Always eager load

rubyonrails-talk
1

Is it possible to make a model always eager load an association, without explicitly specifying it every time? For example:

class Article < AR::Base   has_one :author end

I'm *always* going to need the Author for the Article, so is there a way to set :include => :author by default for find()? I thought about overwriting find() on Article and then just call super() with the :include, but I'm not exactly sure how that would go. Any ideas?

Thanks

2

This seems to work:

def self.find(*args)   options = extract_options_from_args!(args)   options[:include] ||= :author   super(args.first, options) end

Is there an easier way or are there any problems with this approach?

Thanks

3

If there’s already an options[:include] you’re going to use it then, right? [That’s what the code says.] If you’re wanting to append it to any other manual :include, you’ll need to convert options[:include] to an array and all. If there’s no other possible models to include then you could options[:include] = :author instead. But I’d say you’ve got it solved already.

RSL

4

Actually, it's the opposite, if there is an :include defined then it does nothing, this way I can specify :include => nil if I didn't want to eager load (which won't happen, but just in case). That seems to do the job then, thank you.