Rails Make a Birthday Calendar

Question

I would like to make a birthday calendar based on the example in Railscast #213 (Revised) for our members for each month. Each member has a birth_date and has_many memberships at different locations.

To solve the problem, I thought I would make a hash of every members birthday by location, by day and month. Then I could walk through the current month and pull the name of every one with a birthday on that day.

From the member index controller

@members = current_org
  .members.joins(:memberships)
  .where("memberships.location_id = #{params[:location_id]}")
  .find_by_sql("SELECT members.*, EXTRACT(DOY FROM birth_date) as yday FROM children ORDER BY yday, first_name")

And then create hash

@member_birthday = @members.group_by { |m| "#{m.birth_date.day}-#{m.birth_date.month}" }

The first issue I have is that the activerecord query returns every member and ignores the where clause. The second issue is if I return an array, the day method does not work. Thirdly, the only way I could get the order right was to put an EXTRACT DOY inside find_by_sql.

Is there a way to do this in rails 3.1 in activerecord and get rid of the find_by_sql? Is there another fast way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

I believe your "find_by_sql" is overriding everything else in the relationship that you are building, instead of calling find_by_sql there, restructure your query like such:

current_org.select("members.*, EXTRACT(DOY FROM birthday_date").joins("membership on memberships.id = X").where(....)