I've looked over the Arel sources, and some of the activerecord sources for Rails 3.0, but I can't seem to glean a good answer for myself as to whether Arel will be changing our ability to use includes(), when constructing queries, for the better.
There are instances when one might want to modify the conditions on an activerecord :include query in 2.3.5 and before, for the association records which would be returned. But as far as I know, this is not programmatically tenable for all :include queries:
(I know some AR-find-includes make t#{n}.c#{m} renames for all the attributes, and one could conceivably add conditions to these queries to limit the joined sets' results; but others do n_joins + 1 number of queries over the id sets iteratively, and I'm not sure how one might hack AR to edit these iterated queries.)
Will Arel allow us to construct ActiveRecord queries which specify the resulting associated model objects when using includes()?
Ex:
User :has_many posts( has_many :comments)
User.all(:include => :posts) #say I wanted the post objects to have their
#comment counts loaded without adding a comment_count column to `posts`.
#At the post level, one could do so by:
posts_with_counts = Post.all(:select => 'posts.*, count(comments.id) as comment_count',
:joins => 'left outer join comments on comments.post_id = posts.id',
:group_by => 'posts.id') #i believe
#But it seems impossible to do so while linking these post objects to each
#user as well, without running User.all() and then zippering the objects into
#some other collection (ugly)
#OR running posts.group_by(&:user) (even uglier, with the n user queries)
ActiveRecord::Relation is a fairly weak wrapper around Base#find_by_sql, so :include queries are not extended in any way by its inclusion.