what is a RoR best practice? match by id or different column?
- by Omnipresent
I had a terrible morning. Lots of emails floating around about why things don't work. Upon investigating I found that there is a data mismatch which is causing errors.
Scenario
Customer and Address are two tables.
Customer contains
class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :address, :foreign_key => "id"
end
Address Contains
class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :customer, :foreign_key => "cid"
end
So the two tables match on id which is the default and that column is auto incremented.
Problem
on the edit Page we have some code like this.
params[:line1] = @customer.first.address.line1
It fails because no matching record is found for a customer in the address table. I don't know why this is happening. It seems that over time a lot of records did not get added to Address table. Now problem is that when a new Customer is added (say with id 500) the Address will be added with some other id (say 425) ...now you don't know which address belongs to which customer.
Question
Being new to Rails, I am asking whether it is always considered good to create an extra column for joining of the records, rather than depending on the column that is automatically incremented? If I had a seperate column in Address table where I would manually insert the recently added customers id then this issue would not have come up.
