Creating a Rails 3 scope that joins to a subquery - sql

Question

First off, I'm a Ruby/Rails newbie, so I apologize if this question is basic.
I've got a DB that (among other things) looks like this:
organizations { id, name, current_survey_id }
surveys { id, organization_id }
responses { id, survey_id, question_response_integer }
I'm trying to create a scope method that adds the average of the current survey answers to a passed-in Organization relation. In other words, the scope that's getting passed into the method would generate SQL that looks like more-or-less like this:
select * from organizations
And I'd like the scope, after it gets processed by my lambda, to generate SQL that looks like this:
select o.id, o.name, cs.average_responses
from organizations o join
(select r.id, avg(r.question_response_integer) as average_responses
from responses r
group by r.id) cs on cs.id = o.current_survey_id
The best I've got is something like this:
current_survey_average: lambda do |scope, sort_direction|
average_answers = Responses.
select("survey_id, avg(question_response_integer) as average_responses").
group("survey_id")
scope.joins(average_answers).order("average_responses #{sort_direction}")
end
That's mostly just a stab in the dark - among other things, it doesn't specify how the scope could be expected to join to average_answers - but I haven't been able to find any documentation about how to do that sort of join, and I'm running out of things to try.
Any suggestions?
EDIT: Thanks to Sean Hill for the answer. Just to have it on record, here's the code I ended up going with:
current_survey_average: lambda do |scope, sort_direction|
scope_table = scope.arel.froms.first.name
query = <<-QUERY
inner join (
select r.survey_id, avg(r.question_response_integer) as average_responses
from responses r
group by r.survey_id
) cs
on cs.survey_id = #{scope_table}.current_survey_id
QUERY
scope.
joins(query).
order("cs.average_responses #{sort_direction}")
end
That said, I can see the benefit of putting the averaged_answers scope directly onto the Responses class - so I may end up doing that.

Answer 1

I have not been able to test this, but I think the following would work, either as-is or with a little tweaking.
class Response < ActiveRecord::Base
scope :averaged, -> { select('r.id, avg(r.question_response_integer) as average_responses').group('r.id') }
scope :current_survey_average, ->(incoming_scope, sort_direction) do
scope_table = incoming_scope.arel.froms.first.name
query = <<-QUERY
INNER JOIN ( #{Arel.sql(averaged.to_sql)} ) cs
ON cs.id = #{scope_table}.current_survey_id
QUERY
incoming_scope.joins(query).order("average_responses #{sort_direction}")
end
end
So what I've done here is that I have split out the inner query into another scope called averaged. Since you do not know which table the incoming scope in current_survey_average is coming from, I got the scope table name via scope.arel.froms.first.name. Then I created a query string that uses the averaged scope and joined it using the scope_table variable. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.
If you do know that the incoming scope will always be from the organizations table, then you don't need the extra scope_table variable. You can just hardcode it into the join query string.
I would make one suggestion. If you do not have control over sort_direction, then I would not directly input that into the order string.