Rails Associations - ruby-on-rails

I have a Rails 2.3.11 app which has two key Models:
Activity
Transaction
Live site: http://iatidata.heroku.com
Github: https://github.com/markbrough/IATI-Data
Every transaction nests under an activity. Each activity has multiple transactions.
I think I've got confused about how associations work in Rails, but maybe what I'm trying to do isn't possible.
Essentially, I want to get the total value of the transactions of all the activities which belong to each country. So how much money went to India, how much to Afghanistan, etc.
This works:
#thiscountry_activities.each do |a|
#thiscountry_value = #thiscountry_value + a.transactions.sum(:value)
end
But this doesn't work:
#thiscountry_value = #thiscountry_activities.transactions.sum(:value)
It gives this error:
undefined method `transactions' for #<Array:0xb5670038>
#thiscountry_activities is defined like this:
#activities = Activity.find(:all, :conditions=> #conditions)
This is placed within a loop which gets each recipient country code. #conditions are :
#conditions[:recipient_country_code]=*each recipient country code, e.g. AF*
Looks like I have some sort of association problem. This is how the models are set up:
class Transaction < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :activity
end
class Activity < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :policy_markers
has_and_belongs_to_many :sectors
has_many :transactions
end
I think this is probably quite a simple problem, but I can't work out what's going on. The two models are connected together via id (in Activity) and activity_id (in Transactions).
Thank you!

Nothing is broken, the find method in Rails2 returns an Array - and there is no transactions method on the Array class. Use the first thing you have that's working, with the each iterator, or work from the other side - from Transaction and grouping by the activity. It's been a while since I wrote Rails2 code, but it'll be something like this:
Transaction.all( :select => "activity_id, SUM(value) AS total", :group => 'activity_id' )
That's not ready to copy-paste into your app as-is because there are some things about your app which aren't clear to me, but hopefully it sets you in the right direction.

Related

Rails - How to query records in 5 different tables by user_id

I have models UserVote, Comment, Edit, etc, all of which have a user_id attribute. I'm trying to create a sort of timeline of recent activity, and this has me querying all 5 of my models separately and sorting by datetime. However, with accounts that have a lot of activity, these 5 queries take a very long time to execute. I'd like to find a way to optimize the performance, and I figured combining the 5 queries might work.
I haven't been able to come up with any working query to achieve what I'd like.
Thanks for any help!
I think the best suggestion in the comments is from Steve Jorgensen, with "I have generally seen this done by adding records to an activity log, and then querying that.".
If you want to take this idea to the next level, check out sphinx (a search engine designed for indexing database content). You can integrate easily with rails using thinksphinx - http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/.
Also, as Tim Peters brings up, you really should have indexs on all of your fkeys, regardless of how you solve this - http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/ConnectionAdapters/SchemaStatements/add_index.
I think it is good idea to use Polymorphic associations for this problem - http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polymorphic-associations
class TimeLine < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :timelineable, :polymorphic => true
end
class UserVote < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :time_lines, :as => :timelineable
end
class Comments < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :time_lines, :as => :timelineable
end
Now you can sort time_line and access associated resources.

Finding nil has_one associations in where query

This may be a simple question, but I seem to be pulling my hair out to find an elegant solution here. I have two ActiveRecord model classes, with a has_one and belongs_to association between them:
class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :purchase
end
class Purchase < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :item
end
I'm looking for an elegant way to find all Item objects, that have no purchase object associated with them, ideally without resorting to having a boolean is_purchased or similar attribute on the Item.
Right now I have:
purchases = Purchase.all
Item.where('id not in (?)', purchases.map(&:item_id))
Which works, but seems inefficient to me, as it's performing two queries (and purchases could be a massive record set).
Running Rails 3.1.0
It's quite common task, SQL OUTER JOIN usually works fine for it. Take a look here, for example.
In you case try to use something like
not_purchased_items = Item.joins("LEFT OUTER JOIN purchases ON purchases.item_id = items.id").where("purchases.id IS null")
Found two other railsey ways of doing this:
Item.includes(:purchase).references(:purchase).where("purchases.id IS NULL")
Item.includes(:purchase).where(purchases: { id: nil })
Technically the first example works without the 'references' clause but Rails 4 spits deprecation warnings without it.
A more concise version of #dimuch solution is to use the left_outer_joins method introduced in Rails 5:
Item.left_outer_joins(:purchase).where(purchases: {id: nil})
Note that in the left_outer_joins call :purchase is singular (it is the name of the method created by the has_one declaration), and in the where clause :purchases is plural (here it is the name of the table that the id field belongs to.)
Rails 6.1 has added a query method called missing in the ActiveRecord::QueryMethods::WhereChain class.
It returns a new relation with a left outer join and where clause between the parent and child models to identify missing relations.
Example:
Item.where.missing(:purchase)

Rails: Sum of values in all Transactions that belong_to an Activity

Live site: http://iatidata.heroku.com
Github: https://github.com/markbrough/IATI-Data
Based on aid information released through the IATI Registry: iatiregistry.org
I'm a bit of a Rails n00b so sorry if this is a really stupid question.
There are two key Models in this app:
Activity - which contains details
such as recipient country, funding
organisation
Transaction - which contains details such as how much money (value) was committed or disbursed (transaction_type), when, to whom, etc.
All Transactions nest under an Activity. Each Activity has multiple Transactions. They are connected together by activity_id. has_many :transactions and belongs_to :activity are defined in the Activity and Transaction Models respectively.
So: all of this works great when I'm trying to get details of transactions for a single activity - either when looking at a single activity (activity->show) or looping through activities on the all activities page (activity->index). I just call
#activities.each do |activity|
activity.transactions.each do |transaction|
transaction.value # do something like display it
end
end
But what I now really want to do is to get the sum of all transactions for all activities (subject to :conditions for the activity).
What's the best way to do this? I guess I could do something like:
#totalvalue = 0
#activities.each do |activity|
activity.transactions.each do |transaction|
#totalvalue = #totalvalue + transaction.value
end
end
... but that doesn't seem very clean and making the server do unnecessary work. I figure it might be something to do with the model...?! sum() is another option maybe?
This has partly come about because I want to show the total amount going to each country for the nice bubbles on the front page :)
Thanks very much for any help!
Update:
Thanks for all the responses! So, this works now:
#thiscountry_activities.each do |a|
#thiscountry_value = #thiscountry_value + a.transactions.sum(:value)
end
But this doesn't work:
#thiscountry_value = #thiscountry_activities.transactions.sum(:value)
It gives this error:
undefined method `transactions' for #<Array:0xb5670038>
Looks like I have some sort of association problem. This is how the models are set up:
class Transaction < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :activity
end
class Activity < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :policy_markers
has_and_belongs_to_many :sectors
has_many :transactions
end
I think this is probably quite a simple problem, but I can't work out what's going on. The two models are connected together via id (in Activity) and activity_id (in Transactions).
Thanks again!
Use Active Record's awesome sum method, available for classes:
Transaction.sum(:value)
Or, like you want, associations:
activity.transactions.sum(:value)
Let the database do the work:
#total_value = Transaction.sum(:value)
This gives the total for all transactions. If you have some activities already loaded, you can filter them this way:
#total_value = Transaction.where(:activity_id => #activities.map(&:id)).sum(:value)
You can do it with one query:
#total_value = Transaction.joins(:activity).where("activities.name" => 'foo').sum(:value)
My code was getting pretty messy summing up virtual attributes. So I wrote this little method to do it for me. You just pass in a collection and a method name as a string or symbol and you get back a total. I hope someone finds this useful.
def vsum collection, v_attr # Totals the virtual attributes of a collection
total = 0
collection.each { |collect| total += collect.method(v_attr).call }
return total
end
# Example use
total_credits = vsum(Account.transactions, :credit)
Of course you don't need this if :credit is a table column. You are better off using the built in ActiveRecord method above. In my case i have a :quantity column that when positive is a :credit and negative is a :debit. Since :debit and :credit are not table columns they can't be summed using ActiveRecord.
As I understood, you would like to have the sum of all values of the transaction table. You can use SQL for that. I think it will be faster than doing it the Ruby way.
select sum(value) as transaction_value_sum from transaction;
You could do
#total_value = activity.transactions.sum(:value)
http://ar.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Calculations/ClassMethods.html

select many through many... kind of

This is my first post on Stack, so please bear with me if I breach any protocol.
I'm working on a project in Rails (2.1.2), and I have a relations scenario that looks like this:
event [has_many] days
People (in different categories) can sign up for event days, giving the following binding results:
category [has_many] customers [has_many] orders [has_many] days
[belongs_to] event
Now, I'd like to have the total number of 'events' for one customer, or for all customers in a certain category, and I'm stuck. AFAIK, there's no way of performing a simple 'find' through an array of objects, correct? So, what would be the solution; nested loops, and a collect method to get the 'events' from the 'days' in orders?
Please let me know if I'm unclear.
Thanks for your help!
I would personally do this using a MySQL statement. I don't know for sure, but I think it is a lot faster then the other examples (using the rails provided association methods).
That means that in the Customer model you could do something like:
(Note that I'm assuming you are using the default association keys: 'model_name_id')
class Customer
def events
Event.find_by_sql("SELECT DISTINCT e.* FROM events e, days d, orders o, customers c WHERE c.id=o.customer_id AND o.id=d.order_id AND e.id=d.event_id")
end
end
That will return all the events associated with the user, and no duplicated (the 'DISTINCT' keyword makes sure of that). You will, as with the example above, lose information about what days exactly the user signed up for. If you need that information, please say so.
Also, I haven't included an example for your Category model, because I assumed you could adapt my example yourself. If not, just let me know.
EDIT:
I just read you just want to count the events. That can be done even faster (or at least, less memory intensive) using the count statement. To use that, just use the following function:
def event_count
Event.count_by_sql(SELECT DISTINCT COUNT(e.*) FROM ... ... ...
end
Your models probably look like this:
class Category
has_many :customers
class Customer
has_many :orders
has_many :days, :through => :orders # I added this
belongs_to :category
class Order
has_many :days
belongs_to :customer
class Day
belongs_to :event
belongs_to :order
class Event
has_many :days
With this you can count events for customer:
events = customer.days.count(:group => 'event_id')
It will return OrderedHash like this:
#<OrderedHash {1=>5, 2=>13, 3=>0}>
You can get events count by:
events[event_id]
events[1] # => 5
events[2] # => 13
etc.
If you want total number of uniq events:
events.size # => 3
In case of counting events for all customers in category I'd do something like this:
events = {}
category.customers.each {|c| events.merge!(c.days.count(:group => 'event_id') ) }
events.size # => 9 - it should be total number of events
But in this case you lose information how many times each event appeared.
I didn't test this, so there could be some mistakes.

Overwriting/Adding an ActiveRecord association dynamically using a singleton class

The business logic is this: Users are in a Boat through a join table, I guess let's call that model a Ticket. But when a User instance wants to check who else is on the boat, there's a condition that asks if that user has permission see everyone on the Boat, or just certain people on the Boat. If a User can see everyone, the normal deal is fine: some_user.boats.first.users returns all users with a ticket for that boat. But for some users, the only people that are on the boat (as far as they're concerned) are people in, let's say the dining room. So if User's ticket is "tagged" (using an acts_as_taggable style system) with "Dining Room", the only Users returned from some_user.boats.first.users should be Users with tickets tagged "Dining Room".
Just for the record, I'm not trying to design something to be insane from the getgo - I'm trying to wedge this arbitrary grouping into a (mostly) existent system.
So we've got:
class User
has_many :tickets
has_many :boats, :through => :tickets
end
class Ticket
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :boat
end
class Boat
has_many :tickets
has_many :users, :through => :tickets
end
Initially, I thought that I could conditionally modify the virtual class like:
singleton = class << a_user_instance ; self ; end
singleton.class_eval(<<-code
has_many :tickets, :include => :tags, :conditions => ['tags.id in (?)', [#{tag_ids.to_s(:db)}]]
code
)
That gets all the way down to generating the SQL, but when generated, it generates SQL ending in:
LEFT OUTER JOIN "tags" ON ("tags"."id" = "taggings"."tag_id") WHERE ("tickets"._id = 1069416589 AND (tags.id in (5001,4502)))
I've tried digging around the ActiveRecord code, but I can't find anywhere that would prefix that 'id' in the SQL above with an underscore. I know that associations are loaded when an ActiveRecord class is loaded, and I'd assume the same with a singleton class. shrug.
I also used an alias_method_chain like:
singleton = class << a_user_instance ; self ; end
singleton.class_eval(<<-code
def tickets_with_tag_filtering
tags = Tag.find(etc, etc)
tickets_without_tag_filtering.scoped(:include => :tags, :conditions => {:'tags.id' => tags})
end
alias_method_chain :tickets, :tag_filtering
code
)
But while that approach produces the desired Tickets, any joins on those tickets use the conditions in the class, not the virtual class. some_user.boats.first.users returns all users.
Any type of comment will be appreciated, especially if I'm barking up the wrong tree with this approach. Thanks!
So a wild guess about your underscore issue is that Rails is generating the assocation code based on the context at the time of evaluation. Being in a singleton class could mess this up, like so:
"#{owner.table_name}.#{association.class.name}_id = #{association.id}"
You could get in there and define a class name property on your singleton class and see if that fixes the issue.
On the whole I don't recommend this. It creates behavior that is agonizing to track down and impossible to extend effectively. It creates a landmine in the codebase that will wound you or someone you love at a later time.
Instead, consider using a named_scope declaration:
class User
has_many :taggings, :through => :tickets
named_scope :visible_to, lambda { |looking_user|
{ :include => [ :tickets, :taggings ],
:conditions => [ "tickets.boat_id in (?) and taggings.ticket_id = tickets.id and taggings.tag_id in (?)", looking_user.boat_ids, looking_user.tag_ids ]
}
}
end
While you may have to go back and edit some code, this is much more flexible in the ways it can be used:
Boat.last.users.visible_to( current_user )
It's clear that a restriction is being placed on the find, and what the purpose of that restriction is. Because the conditions are dynamically calculated at runtime, you can deal with the next weird modification your client hits you with. Say some of their users have xray vision and clairvoyance:
class User
named_scope :visible_to, lambda { |looking_user|
if looking_user.superhuman?
{}
else
{ :include => [ :tickets, :taggings ],
:conditions => [ "tickets.boat_id in (?) and taggings.ticket_id = tickets.id and taggings.tag_id in (?)", looking_user.boat_ids, looking_user.tag_ids ]
}
end
}
end
By returning an empty hash, you can effectively nullify the effect of the scope.
Why not just grab all users on the boat and include their tags.
Then run a quick filter to include & return only the users with the same tag as the inquiring user.
What version of Rails are you using? Have you tried upgrading to see if the underscore issue is fixed? It's like it can't find the foreign key to put in as "tag_id" or somethin'.
My ruby-fu is limited, so I'm not sure how to dynamically include the correct method options at run-time.
Just to help you clarify, you have to worry about this two places. You want to filter a user's viewable users so they only see users with the same tags. Your structure is:
user <--> tickets <--> boats <--> tickets <--> users
... right?
So, you need to filter both sets of tickets down to the ones with the current_user's tags.
Maybe you just need a current_user.viewable_users() method and then filter everything through that? I'm not sure what existing functionality you've got to preserve.
Blech, I don't feel like I'm helping you at all. Sorry.
Your approach is the problem. I know it seems expedient at the moment to hack something in where you don't have to refactor the existing call sites, but I believe given time this will come back to haunt you as the source of bugs and complexity.
Sleeping dogs that lie come back to bite you hard, in my experience. Typically in the form of a future developer who doesn't know your association is "magic" and uses it assuming it's just pail ole rails. He/she likely won't even have a reason to write a test case that would expose the behavior either, which raises the odds you'll only find out about the bug when it's live in production and the client is unhappy. Is it really worth the time you're saving now?
Austinfrombostin is pointing the way. Different semantics? Different names. Rule number one is always to write code that says what it does as clearly as possible. Anything else is the path of madness.

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