I have posts which are sent by users to other users. There are two models - :post and :user, and :post has the following named associations:
belongs_to :from_user, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "from_user_id"
belongs_to :to_user, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "to_user_id"
Both :user and :post have "is_public" column, indicating that either a single post and/or the entire user profile can be public or private.
My goal is to fetch a list of posts which are public AND whose recipients have public profiles. At the same time, I would like to "include" both sender and recipient info to minimize the # of db calls. The challenge is that I am effectively "including" the same table twice via the named associations, but in my "conditions" I need to make sure that I only filter by the recipient's "is_public" column.
I can't do the following because "conditions" does not accept an association name as a parameter:
Post.find(:all, :include => [ :to_user, :from_user ],
:conditions => { :is_public => true, :to_user => { :is_public => true }})
So, one way I can accomplish this is by doing an additional "join" on the "users" table:
Post.find(:all, :include => [ :to_user, :from_user ],
:joins => "inner join users toalias on posts.to_user_id = toalias.id",
:conditions => { :is_public => true, 'toalias.is_public' => true })
Is there a better, perhaps cleaner, way to do this?
Thanks in advance