CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails
Bas
Bas

Reputation: 834

Naming your foreign keys

Suppose you have a model User and a model Challenge.

One User can be the supervisor of a challenge. Therefor a Challenge has a belongs_to relation with the User.

The relation is declared as following in challenge.rb:

  class Challenge < ActiveRecord::Base
     belongs_to :supervisor, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "user_id"

Resulting in the following schema.rb:

  create_table "challenges", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "title"
    t.text     "description"
    t.datetime "start_date"
    t.datetime "end_date"
    t.string   "state"
    t.integer  "count"
    t.datetime "created_at",  :null => false
    t.datetime "updated_at",  :null => false

    # Notable line: 
    t.integer  "user_id"
  end

Should the foreign key in the schema be named supervisor_id or user_id?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 98

Answers (1)

PinnyM
PinnyM

Reputation: 35533

By convention, you would have a simpler time if you named it supervisor_id for 2 reasons:

  • You can skip the :foreign_key modifier in the belongs_to declaration
  • If you ever need another belongs_to relationship that links to a generic user, you can call that one user_id without needing to rename anything

Other than that, it really doesn't matter. That is, Rails won't care. And it certainly isn't worth the time for a 'heated discussion'.

Upvotes: 3

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