Non-standard primary key column

rubyonrails-talk
1

Good day! I've recently started to develop under rails. I have a migration that should create a table, and I want the primary key id to be not standard auto-incrementing integer but explicitly given string. I have language codes and language native names in the table so I don't want either to keep that meaningless integer id in the db or to have it appear in the uri. The first question is, does this seriously compromise rails' magic? Will scaffolding work? The second question is, the migration doesn't work as I suppose it should. It is

class CreateLanguages < ActiveRecord::Migration    def self.up      create_table :languages, {:id=>false} do |t|     t.column :id, :string, {:limit=>12}     t.column :name, :string, {:limit=>60, :null=>false}     t.primary_key :id      end    end

But what is created is like the last line is ignored

`id` varchar(12) default NULL,   `name` varchar(60) NOT NULL

I'm using MySQL 5.0

Could you please clarify this behaviour and make a suggestion?

Your sincerely, Damian/Three-eyed Fish

2

Yes, this seriously compromises rails' magic. It expects an auto incremented integer.

I'm not sure about the t.primary_key method, but this should work:

def self.up   execute "ALTER TABLE languages ADD id string(12) DEFAULT NULL PRIMARY KEY" end

A bit not-so-clean, though.

3

Thank you! I hope I will change my thinking and implement my system in a more railish way.

Your sincerely, Damian/Three-eyed Fish