Ruby on Rails Database with foreign keys?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I started a project on Ruby on Rails some time ago when the migration feature wasn't part of Rails. I used to have one big SQL file that creates the whole database and adds the foreign constraints. They looked like that:

CONSTRAINT FK_users_countries         FOREIGN KEY FK_users_countries (country_id)             REFERENCES countries(country_id)             ON DELETE RESTRICT             ON UPDATE RESTRICT

Now I want to use migration features so I used

rake db:schema:dump

When I look at the schema.rb file i don't like what i see ;(. All the tables are there but the are no primary keys and also there are no Foreign Keys.

My question is can i use the ruby way to create foreign keys? And why

rake db:schema:dump

doesn't work?

Nikola

2

Rails nerds are not big on FKs - I don't like it but if want to play along - learn to.

You can put FK constraints in your migrations as SQL statements - execute """ ALTER ..... """

The FK don't show up in the schema.rb - See first statement above

They cause problems with fixtures - See first statement above

3

google for the foreign key migrations plugin from redhill consulting. I use that on my rails apps and it works great.