ActiveRecord Join Query and select in Rails

Question

In my rails 4 application, a client (clients table) can have many projects (projects table). I have a column called name in each table. I am trying to write a join and then select which uses projects as the base table and clients as the lookup table. client_id is the foreign_key in the projects table:

I am writing my query as follows:

Project.joins(:client).select('projects.id,projects.name,clients.name') 

I get the following response:

Project Load (0.6ms)  SELECT projects.id,projects.name,clients.name FROM "projects" INNER JOIN "clients" ON "clients"."id" = "projects"."client_id" => #<ActiveRecord::Relation [#<Project id: 1, name: "Fantastico Client">]> 

If I try to alias it like so:

Project.joins(:client).select('projects.id,projects.name,clients.name as client_name') 

Then I get the following response:

Project Load (0.8ms)  SELECT projects.id,projects.name,clients.name as client_name FROM "projects" INNER JOIN "clients" ON "clients"."id" = "projects"."client_id" => #<ActiveRecord::Relation [#<Project id: 1, name: "The Dream Project">]> 

In either case, ActiveRecord looses one of the names as you can see from the above response. How should I be writing this query?

Answer 1

If the column in select is not one of the attributes of the model on which the select is called on then those columns are not displayed. All of these attributes are still contained in the objects within AR::Relation and are accessible as any other public instance attributes.

You could verify this by calling first.client_name:

Project.joins(:client)        .select('projects.id,projects.name,clients.name as client_name')        .first.client_name 

Answer 2

You can use :'clients.name' as one of your symbols. For instance:

Project.select(:id, :name, :'clients.name').joins(:client) 

I like it better because it seems like Rails understands it, since it quotes all parameters:

SELECT "projects"."id", "projects"."name", "clients"."name" FROM "projects" INNER JOIN "clients" ON "clients"."id" = "projects"."client_id" 

(I'm not 100% sure that's the exact SQL query, but I'm fairly certain and I promise it will use "clients"."name")