Hi all,
A short while ago some of us were wondering on rails-contrib/here about the feasibility of Base.find returning a proxy object and cool things that we could do with that. I've been toying with a small plugin that adds some of that stuff. It's now in a state where it might be fun for people to play with (Rails' unit tests basically past with this plugin loaded. There are a few failures, but nothing super interesting)
What there's right now:
posts = Post.find :all posts.load :comments => :author #preloads the comments association and the author from comments. Same syntax as your normal :include/ :joins conditions
posts.comments.first #=> triggers an eager load of comments on all posts
posts.comments.first.author #=> triggers an eager load of the author of all comments
Of the quirks I am aware of/anticipate the biggest cause is the fact that in some cases eager loading a collection behaves slightly differently to loading it normally. (for example :order on has many through is a bit off). With this plugin installed basically every association load is an eager load so no hiding from any of those issues.
There are interesting questions around garbage collection: because each record references the collection it was part of, keeping one of them around keeps them all around. Playing with WeakRef is a possibility (but right now that would actually break some of the functionality). Detaching all objects with each request cycle is another as is figuring what patterns indicate that the user probably does want to detach the record and do that automatically. I feel that picking one of the options right now would be premature.
Caveats/Gotchas/etc: - Requires Rails 2.1 - Anything before http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b7a37b742c0abd1df8ea48cc82f76385cc0c41ea (sometime last week) will die horribly if you try and load a has_one through (because preload of has_one :through is borked before that). - has_many associations with a :limit option are excluded because they can't be eager loaded nicely. - has_many :through with options/conditions on the join table will probably be screwed up:
has_many :foos, :conditions => ... has_many :bars, :through => :foos, :conditions => something only on bars
should be ok
has_many :foos has_many :bars, :through => :foos, :conditions => something on foos
probably won't work
Code: http://github.com/fcheung/ar_result_set/tree
I'm at railsconf so grab me/ smack me on the face if you feel so inclined
Fred
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