Ignoring Columns in a Model

Rails
1

I am currently suffering through integrating my beautiful rails app
with an old legacy MS SQL based application. Lets just say that the
database the old app used is not in any way normalized.

So, in my case, I am reading data from the legacy app only – I am not
making any changes. The problem is, each table has 60 columns in it
but in my model I only actually use and care about 5-10 of them.
Retrieving all 60 columns is very slow, so I am trying to get my model
to ignore the columns that I don’t use.

Any guidance on how to accomplish this? For example, if I have a db
table called Orgs:

OrgID
OrgName
Address
Address2
CreationDate
Notes
ContractStatus
…

However, in my Org class, I would like to only have attributes for
OrgID and OrgName. Is there anyway to accomplish this?

Thanks for the assistance,
gnubbs

2

On 2006-09-20, at 18:26 , gnubbs wrote:

but in my model I only actually use and care about 5-10 of them.
Retrieving all 60 columns is very slow, so I am trying to get my model
to ignore the columns that I don’t use.

Model.find :select => “fieldnames”

3

Awesome. Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much.

4

Sweet. I was not aware of this and had been using find_by_sql to achieve
the
same results.
Thanks Caio