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Asked: 2026-05-11T13:55:13+00:00

So I’ve got two models, State and Acquisition. State has_many Acquisitions. I felt like

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So I’ve got two models, State and Acquisition. State has_many Acquisitions. I felt like an autoincrementing integer primary key for 51 records was rather silly. So I altered the model for the State to be the PK (State being the two letter abbreviation; I’m not storing the actual state name anywhere:

class State < ActiveRecord::Base     self.primary_key = 'state'     has_many :acquisition_histories   end

The problem is when I created my Acquisition model, it created the foreign key column state_id as an integer. More specifically, the script/generated migration did:

class CreateAcquisitions < ActiveRecord::Migration     def self.up       create_table :acquisitions do |t|         t.date :date         t.string :category         t.text :notes         t.references :state         t.timestamps       end   end end

I’m assuming that t.references data type sets it to int. The problem is my create method on my Acquisition class is trying to put a state abbreviation into the state_id field on the table acquisitions (and yes, it’s called state_id on the database, even though it says :state in the migration script). The method doesn’t fail, but it does put a 0 in the state_id field and the records go into the ether.

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1 Answer

  1. Rails works best when you don’t fight against the defaults. What harm does it do to have an integer primary key on your state table?

    Unless you’re stuck with a legacy schema that you have no control over, I’d advise you to stick to the Rails defaults—convention over configuration, right?—and concentrate on the important parts of your app, such as the UI and the business logic.

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