Unknow field foreign key

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I am new to ruby on rails and I started creating a small project, but I got stuck. I have two entities one called Category and the other called bills. One category has many bills, so I have setup the Active records and DB Migration. In the bills DB migration I have defined a reference to Category, but when i try to create new bills I stumble upon the erro unknow attribute "category_id. I have checked the fields on the Bills table using rails console and there is a field Category_Id. So i have added to the bills migrations file the new directive column: Category_Id, and still I see the error. what am I doing wrong ?

2

Please post your migration files.

3

Bill migration File

class CreateBills < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    create_table :bills do |t|
      t.string :Description
      t.decimal :amount
      t.date :dateOfPayment
      t.references :category, null: false, foreign_key: true, column: Catogory_id

      t.timestamps
    end
  end
end
4

Category Migration File

class CreateCategories < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    create_table :categories do |t|
      t.string :name
      has_many :bills, dependent: :destroy
      t.timestamps
    end
  end
end
5

Hi Diego. Thanks for posting those files.

Several things:

  • In the first file, in the t.references statement, remove the column: Catogory_id argument. It’s superfluous because Rails will name the foreign key column :category_id by default. And it’s erroneous because Rails expects to see the column name as a Ruby Symbol, not a constant. In addition, “Catogory” is spelled incorrectly. If you really needed to specify the column name because the default name wasn’t appropriate, it would look like this: t.references :category, null: false, foreign_key: true, column: :example_id
  • In the second file, remove the entire has_many line. That belongs in the model, not the migration.
  • The naming convention for Rails DB columns is lower-case, underscore-separated. So dateOfPayment should be date_of_payment. And Description should be description.
6

Hello DJ,

Thanks a lot for your help. I have made the changes that you have suggested but I am still facing the same error.

class CreateBills < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    create_table :bills do |t|
      t.string :description
      t.decimal :amount
      t.date :date_of_payment
      t.references :category, null: false, foreign_key: true, column: :category_id
      t.timestamps
    end
  end
end

class CreateCategories < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    create_table :categories do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.timestamps
    end
  end
end
![errors|690x417](upload://aiIAD7H8g6s6MPMkaMdru7vLwmk.png)
7

I assume you deleted and re-created the database?

Using the corrected migrations, I was able to create a Category record and a Bill record that referenced it. See: GitHub - djmolny/foreign-key-demo

8

Hi DJ,

I did as you said and now everything is working, thanks a lot for your help. I will pay you a beer…

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