non-autoincremented primary keys

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I am trying to populate a legacy table with a primary key of 'id', but the id is not auto-incremented (the id is currently populated with the results from another table that has an auto-incremented id).

I'm POSTing xml to a controller created by the scaffold_resource generator e.g.:

echo ' <user>   <id>2</id>   <name>Tom</name> </user>' | curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: text/xml' -d @- http://localhost:3000/users

However, the id specified in the xml is not saved.

The development log shows the following parameters being received:

  Parameters: {"user"=>{"name"=>"Dick", "id"=>"2"}, "action"=>"create", "controller"=>"users"}

However, in users_controller.create, I am having to explicitly set the id myself

@user = User.new(params[:user]) @user.id = params[:user][:id]

Is there a better way to do this? A setting perhaps regarding a non- autoincremented primary key?

Thanks, Shawn