Just started learning active record and am wondering how to best retrieve data from multiple tables where an SQL aggregate query is involved.

In the following example (from a medical app) I'm looking for the most recent events of various types for each patient (e.g. last visit, last labtest etc). As you can see from the sql query below I'm looking for the max(date) value from a grouped query. I resorted to find\_by\_sql to do this - however I'd like to see how to do this without using find\_by\_sql.

IOW - how would you get the required data here using a pure ActiveRecord approach. Below are the Table and Class defs I'm testing with:

Find by Sql to retrieve most recent entries for each type - note the 'max(event\_date)' here

```
strsql = "select  p.lname, e.patient_id, e.event_type, max(e.event_date) as event_date 
     from events e   
         inner join patients p on e.patient_id = p.id
         group by p.lname, e.patient_id, e.event_type"

```

Here's the sample sql query result:

```

lname, patient_id, event_type, latest
'Hunt', 3, 'Labtest', '2003-05-01 00:00:00'
'Hunt', 3, 'Visit', '2003-03-01 00:00:00'
'Seifer', 2, 'Labtest', '2002-05-01 00:00:00'
'Seifer', 2, 'Visit', '2002-03-01 00:00:00'

Table Relationships are:
Tables ---> Patients --> Events
                               --> visits
                               --> labtests
                               --> ... other
patients
      t.string :lname
      t.date :dob

events
      t.column :patient_id, :integer
      t.column :event_date, :datetime
      t.column :event_type, :string

visits 
      t.column :event_id, :integer
      t.column :visittype, :string

labtests
      t.column :event_id, :integer
      t.column :testtype, :string
      t.column :testvalue, :string

```

Classes

```
class Patient < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :events
  has_many :visits, :through =>:events
  has_many :labtests, :through => :events
end

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :visits
  has_many :labtests
  belongs_to :patient
end

class Visit < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :event
end

class Labtest < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :event
end

```