Question

I have a web interface which is using a database for its contents. The database is pretty much arbitrarily designed without following any standard.

I want to write some APIs on top of this database. My front-end is going to consume these APIs.

I am using ActiveRecord as the ORM. The problem is that I am unable to define any associations or joins on my existing tables as both of these operations expect a column named id in the referenced table.

What’s the way to go about it given that I don’t want to temper my existing database schema?

Answer 1

When you define associations you can use additional options like :foreign_key and :primary_key to specify details about such field names.

belongs_to :person, :primary_key => "name", :foreign_key => "person_name"