Outer Join The Rails 3 Way

Question

i have 3 models like :

location, user, discovered_location(location_id,user_id)

I think i need an outer join in order to get all locations, as well as include the discovered_location model, if that location has been discovered by the user.

I would need something like {location1, location2, location3:includes discovered_location, location4 ..}

Is there a Rails 3 way to do that ? If not, what is the best way ?

EDIT

I want to get the locations specified above, for a certain user. To better illustrate, it should be :

user {location1, location2, location3:includes discovered_location, location4 ..}

(A user has many discovered locations)

Answer 1

You can do an outer join in Rails only by using an SQL literal in the joins method:

joins("OUTER JOIN table2 on table2.column = table1.column")