Rails - Application layout with SQL?

Hello, all my fellow coders! I've got a problem ohh chok!.. :P Now my problem i that i'm trying to make a design for a bigger site, it's going good. Until i should make the content/news slider. It should take data from multiple tables and returning to the application.html.erb.

So it is take reviews and announcements just the latest 5 and order it af开发者_JS百科ter latest created. and then give it to me in the application.html.erb.. (Rails 3.0.0.beta4)

hope you guys understands me.

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Take the latest 5 for all the models, then put all records on an array, sort the array and take the first 5 elements.

# consider moving .order('date desc').limit(5) to a named scope or a module
announcements = Announcement.order('date desc').limit(5)
posts = Post.order('date desc').limit(5)
monkeys = Monkey.order('date desc').limit(5)
# .. add others here

elements = (announcements + posts + monkeys).sort_by(&:date).reverse[1..5]

The variable elements will have the 5, if they exist.

Note: I'm assuming that all your models have a method called "date". You can change it to date_created or whatever.

You can put this code on several places, but I think the best one would be a "home" controller, created specifically for rendering the home page. The elements would be calculated on its show action.

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don't know if it's more performant to use this syntax, instead of the one from egarcia:

elements = (announcements | posts | monkeys).sort_by(&:date).reverse[1..5]

if you need to use this code in several pages (for example in sidebars), then the best way could be to write an helper (say: last_items)