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There are many ways to add the foreign key column that's required by our has_many and belongs_to associations, and I want to take a moment to show you a couple more of them.
There are many ways to add the foreign key column that's required by our has_many
and belongs_to
associations, and I want to take a moment to show you a couple more of them.
- If you want, you can use the
references
column type in migrations instead.bin/rails generate migration AddPostToComments post:references
- That will create a migration with a call to the
add_reference
method instead ofadd_column
.add_reference
takes a symbol with a table name, and a symbol with the name of a model to add a foreign key for. It'll create a column whose name begins with that model name, and ends in_id
. And since it's always desirable to have an index on foreign key columns,add_reference
will add an index as well. Soadd_reference :comments, :post
will create apost_id
column in thecomments
table just likeadd_column
did, but it will also add an index on that column automatically. - The
foreign_key: true
argument will set up a foreign key constraint on databases that support it.
class AddPostToComments < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
def change
add_reference :comments, :post, foreign_key: true
end
end
Without a foreign key constraint, we could create a comment with a post_id
field set to 999
, even if there was no record in the post
table with an id
of 999
. With a foreign key constraint, the database would prevent such a record from even being saved. Foreign key constraints help keep bad data from sneaking into your database.
Note that the adapter for the SQLite database that Rails uses by default doesn't support foreign key constraints. Your migration will still work, and it's a good idea to get in the habit of adding the constraints in your migrations. But if you want the database to actually enforce the constraints, you'll need to switch to another database like MySQL or PostgreSQL.
If we know we're going to need an association when we're first creating a model, we can set the necessary columns up then, too.
- Let's re-generate the
Comment
model. We can replace the two migrations with a single migration that creates thecomments
table and adds apost_id
column along with the other columns:rails g model Comment content:text name:string post:references
.- We can allow it to overwrite the existing model class file, as well as another file related to tests.
- Don't forget to run
bin/rails db:migrate
. - We should now be able to create comments associated with a post again.
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