Select which columns to "reload" with ActiveRecord

There was an interesting ticket on the Rails Lighthouse today.

Regarding;

How can I just reload a couple of columns for a given record?

The suggested solution was a new method for each attribute

  
  record.reload_name

  or 

  record.reload(:name)

  or

  record.name!
  

however,
we can already do this.

  
  record.reload(:select => "name")

  or

  record.reload(:select => "name, other_column")

  or even

  record.reload(:select => "COUNT(SELECT * FROM other_table WHERE foreign_key = this_table.id) AS other_count")
  record.other_count == "12"
  

This is all down to the nice way that .reload(options) works.

Basically coming down to this;

  
  def reload(options=nil)
    new_model = self.class.find(self.id, options)
    self.attributes.update(new_model.attributes)
    return self
  end
  

(see the real code over at github

So it only actually updates the attributes we end up reloading.
nice!