prevent orphan records

rubyonrails-talk
1

If I have

   belongs_to :user

Do I need to have

   validates_presence_of :user_id

?

Does Rails validate the presence of :user_id automatically if I have belongs_to :user?

In other words, does Rails prevent against creating orphan records that belong to non-existent users?

Thanks.

2

I believe rails will not stop you creating a record with an empty user_id. To be pedantic this is 'does not belong to any user' rather than 'belongs to a non-existent user' (for a non-existent user the user_id would contain a non-nil value for which there is no user). In some applications this is a valid requirement. If you wish to prevent this then include validates_presence_of as you have indicated.

Colin

3

Thanks Marnen and Colin for your excellent suggestions.

4

Hi Colin,

After reading the API, I think that

     validates_presence_of :user_id

will not even check to make sure that the user exists in the user table. It only makes sure that the field value is not blank: validates_presence_of (ActiveRecord::Validations::ClassMethods) - APIdock.

So this validation does not do the work of a proper foreign key constraint. Am I reading the API incorrectly?

Thanks.

5

Quoting Learn By Doing <easebus@gmail.com>:

Hi Colin,

After reading the API, I think that

     validates_presence_of :user_id

will not even check to make sure that the user exists in the user table. It only makes sure that the field value is not blank: validates_presence_of (ActiveRecord::Validations::ClassMethods) - APIdock.

So this validation does not do the work of a proper foreign key constraint. Am I reading the API incorrectly?

Yes, there is another validation to verify that the associated object exists and is valid, validates_associated.

HTH,   Jeffrey

6

There is nothing in rails that can validate an associated record exists for a belongs_to relationship.

But you can use Josh Susser's fantastic validates_existence_of plugin that does check whether the associated record exists or not

Check out his post here here has_many :through - Validate your existence

7

Thanks nas. I am surprised that this has not made it to Rails 2.3.2.

8

nas wrote:

There is nothing in rails that can validate an associated record exists for a belongs_to relationship.

But you can use Josh Susser's fantastic validates_existence_of plugin that does check whether the associated record exists or not

Check out his post here here has_many :through - Validate your existence

On Jul 5, 8:44�am, Learn by Doing <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>

I've found that:

validates_presence_of :user_id validates_presence_of :user

works just fine.

From what I have been able to tell, validates_associated is meant for when you are constructing two or more associated models at the same time, and you don't want to save them unless both validate. So your user validates would contain:

validates_associated :address

which would run all the validations for the address model. However, you can't at the same time have a

validates_associated :user

line in the address model, because that will cause an infinite recursion loop of validations.