HMT: Count Associated Items

[Steve_Ross]

I have a members and a projects table. They are associated via a has_many
:through. I want to find out how many members are interested in a specific
project. All I could come up with was:

a = Project.find(:first, :include => :members, :conditions =>
"projects.name='my project'").members.size

Actually, the problem is more complex than this simple example. I want to
find count of members interested in a specific project grouped by date and
filtered by a specific date range.

Is there a calculations magical way to do this or is it strictly
find_by_sql?

Thanks,

steve

[Chris.Mohr]

Check out :counter_cache at
http://www.rubyonrails.org/api/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html

It's also explained on the migrations screencast.
http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/migrations.mov

Hope that helps.

[Steve_Ross]

I wound up using find_by_sql:

     @signups = Member.find_by_sql(
         ["select DATE(created_on) as created_on, count(projects.id)
as counter from members
             join assignments on members.id = assignments.member_id
             join projects on projects.id = assignments.project_id
             where projects.id=?
             group by week(members.created_on)", project_id]

Which gives me a weekly summary of member creation records aggregated
(counted) by week for a certain project. I'm afraid a counter cache
would not be specific enough for the problem I'm trying to solve. I
was hoping there was some natural Rails syntax in Calculations that
would get me close to this.

Steve