Rails, finding object with multiple dates in has_many assocation

Question

I'm pretty new to Rails, and the problem I'm bumping into is described as followes:

First, there is a table with houses. The houses have multiple dates associated with has_many :dates

Second there is the table with dates. Dates have the association belongs_to :house

Now, in a search, a user can select a start and end-date. And what I want to do, is search each house for it's dates, and check if these are between the start and end-date. If one or more of the dates is within the start/end date, it needs to be found.

These are my conditions to search a house for other criteria:

parameters.push( [ params[:house_category_id], "houses.house_category_id = ?" ] );
parameters.push( [ params[:province_id], "houses.province_id = ?" ] );

I've created a method to create valid conditions with these parameters.

Please tell me, if it's not clear enough, cause it's a little hard to explain.

I've tried searching for this, but it got me on all kind of other pages except the pages with an answer..

Thanks

Answer 1

Not sure if I understand your problem correctly, but according to what I understood, you can get the desired result using the following:

res = House.find(:all, :select => 'distinct houses.*', :joins => "INNER JOIN dates ON dates.house_id = houses.id", :conditions => "dates.date < '2011-01-12' AND dates.date > '2011-01-11'")

where '2011-01-12' & '2011-01-11' are the dates selected by the user.

Let me know if this is what you were looking for or post with more details.

Answer 2

Now another question pops in my mind, but I don't know if that is possible.. If you forget about the from-to for this situation, is there any possibility that a I can check this sort of associations like so:

A house has 2 dates attached.

A User selects 2 dates.

Now I only want to select the house if these 2 dates both correspond..

Like this:

@houses = House.find(:all, :select => 'distinct houses.*', :joins => "INNER JOIN dates ON dates.house_id = houses.id", :conditions => "dates.date = '2011-01-12' AND dates.date = '2011-01-11'")

I tried the code above and got an SQL like this:

SELECT distinct houses.* FROM `houses` INNER JOIN dates ON dates.house_id = houses.id WHERE (dates.date = '2011-01-15' AND dates.date = '2011-01-22')

But it doesn't seem to work, is this possible at all in a single query or single find( )?