I have a child relationship that is denormalized. I want to normalize it at the object level once it's retrieved:
class Parent has_many :denormalized_children, :class_name=>'Child'
def children if @normalized_children.nil? @normalized_children = denormalized_children.group_by(&:number).each { |c| @normalized_children << NormalizedChild.new(c) } end @normalized_children end end
This works fine, but I don't want to eager load them as :denormalized_children. I'd like to use :children. So I tried:
class Parent has_many :children
alias :denormalized_children :children def children #Same definition end end
AR doesn't like this as it expects the children prop to return something that responds to loaded.
has_many :children, :group=>'number'
doesnt work either since it discards all but N unique numbers. So if I have 10 with number 1 and 5 with number 2 I'll only get back 2 children.
Is there any way to do this without having to change the name of the relationship?
I can't use after_load (or whatever it's called) in the Child class since the children need to be grouped by their relationship to their parent.
Any suggestions would be great.
Thanks