In order for ‘dependent’ to work and all child records to be destroyed when parent is, does the child foreign key have to be the id of the parent record ? i.e.
parent table | id | 5
child table | id |parent_id| 1 5
or could the foreign key be another field that ties all the records together, say a user_id ?
Stuart
This is correct. In the relationship definition you can use the option :dependent => :destroy, this will delete all the records in the child table that refers back to its parent. If there are no other dependencies of the child records then you can use :dependent => :delete_all option. This will issue the SQL query in one shot and improve the efficiency.
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