Question

Complete newbie researching Rails. Can Rails be used with a read-only schema that doesn’t conform to the Rails’ default naming and design conventions?

For example, my database’s schema has base tables that use string columns for unique primary keys. For example, a base table called Jobs, might have a unique primary key defined as Jobs.Job and the value might be ‘D01234’. Now, a child entity of Jobs might be CostCodes where the unique primary key is the aggregate of CostCodes.Job (an FK reference back tothe Jobs table) and CostCodes.CostCode (a local string column).

For what it’s worth… this is the stock Sage Timberline Office database.

Any pointers?

Answer 1

Yes, it can be done.

Dave Thomas has a blog post describing a little of what’s necessary: directives such as

set_table_name  'orders' set_primary_key 'o_id' 

in your ActiveRecord model definitions.

Some more references:

• ActiveRecord::Base api
• Rails Wiki

Googling for ‘activerecord legacy database’ ought to pick up some more.