I've had a number of cases now where I'm working with AR objects that have associations, but I don't always want to query on the associations or retrieve them from the database. What about an option to find() that tells AR to not join on certain associates when doing a select? I'm thinking of a syntax just like :include which is used for eager loading. :exclude would tell AR to not do a join on the models that are excluded.
This has become even more of an issue recently when working with webservices, because record structure are predefined in the webservice api and that limits some of the tricks available for working around this issue.
Chris