CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysqllaraveleloquentmigration
Alan
Alan

Reputation: 2639

Renaming a table that is a foreign key in another table

I had a table neighboorhoods and a table schools with a neighboorhood_id field.

When I saw that it was misspelled I wanted to change the name to the correct form.

First I used phpStorm's name refactor tool and changed the model to Neighborhood, then I added the $table = 'neighboorhood'.

Then I made a migration to rename the table, deleted the $table property and everything is working fine.

I thought it was going to throw an error because the foreign key constraint was created this way:

$table->foreign('neighboorhood_id')->references('id')->on('neighboorhoods')->onDelete('cascade');

And now it works without having to update it to:

$table->foreign('neighborhood_id')->references('id')->on('neighborhoods')->onDelete('cascade');

Why didn't I have to modify the constraint? I checked the constraint in the database and now it's pointing to neighborhoods table instead of neighboorhoods.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1995

Answers (1)

Jan Willem
Jan Willem

Reputation: 1320

I've also had such a situation. Apparently InnoDB doesnt use the table name as a reference to the constraint: it uses some internal identity instead (not sure about other database types).

Think about it as an ID, which stays the same when the name of the table changes.

However, the docs say something different, so dropping and creating a new foreign key would definitely be a good thing to do.

Foreign keys that point to the renamed table are not automatically updated. In such cases, you must drop and re-create the foreign keys in order for them to function properly.

Upvotes: 1

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