Gunnar Wolf: Some Rails plugins: Real FK
I have mostly shifted my main development language to Ruby, as most of the work I do tends to be pretty well covered with Rails. That's not new, however - What is new is that I feel I have got to the point where I actually have something to share. And it feels very good.So my next couple of posts (three, actually) will be covering some plugins I've written. They are, of course, just sketched - but they work reliably enough to be deemed as useful by their author ;-)
Today I will start by blogging about RealFK. Of course, I will be copying from its documentation/description - I wrote it as well, so I'm not really plagiarizing my own site. I'm not suing self. You can of course also browse the RealFK SVN tree. References Rails is built upon a "dumb database" concept. Rails assumes the database will not force restrictions upon the user - i.e. that the model validators are all there is. But I disagree ;-) I was raised with PostgreSQL, not with MySQL, and I do believe the database can and should impose sane values - It should impose trust on the data..
So, if you want to create a relation field, properly acting as a foreign key and refering to another table, instead of doing it via the ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition#column (or even ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition#references) methods, declare them with add_refrence:
def self.up
create_table :proposals do t
(...)
end
create_table :proposal_types do t
(...)
end
create_table :proposal_statuses do t
(...)
end
add_reference :proposals, :proposal_types
add_reference :proposals, :proposal_statuses, :null => false, :default => 1
end
The corresponding fields (proposal_type_id and proposal_status_id, respectively) will be created in proposals, and the RDBMS will impose a Foreign Key constraint. The references can be removed via remove_reference, i.e., for inclusion in down migrations:
def self.down
remove_reference :proposals, :proposal_types
remove_reference :proposals, :proposal_statuses
drop_table :proposal_statuses
drop_table :proposal_types
drop_table :proposals
end
Of course, in this case the remove_reference call is not really needed - But if you are dropping a table that is referred to from a table that will remain existing, you will have to remove the foreign key constraints (that is, the referring columns).
Join (HABTM) tables
When you define a simple has_and_belongs_to_many (HABTM) relation in your model, you are expected to create an extra table representing this relation. This is a very simple table (i.e. it has only a row for each of the related table‘s IDs), and it carries foreign key constraints.Please note that join tables are not supposed to carry any extra columns - If you need to add information to join tables, think twice and better use a has_many :elements, :through => :othermodel declaration, and create the othermodel table manually. To create a HABTM table representing that each person can attend many conferences and each conference can be attended by many people:
def self.up
create_table :people do t
(...)
end
create_table :conferences do t
(...)
end
create_habtm :people, :conferences
end
def self.down
drop_habtm :people, :conferences
drop_table :people
drop_table :conferences
end
The last call will create a conferences_people table (according to Rails' conventions, table names are sorted alphabetically to get the join table‘s name).Note that in this case, in the down migration, the drop_habtm call must appear before the drop_table calls, as it carries foreign key constraints.
(either marked red or written on it).
* Still, if you can’t find place, play ‘frozen-bubble’ or finish pending calls and wait for your stop!
And, yes. Don’t assume that ’same bus number’ will reach you at ’same place’. The bus number on BMTC is volatile. And, please don’t ask ‘How to travel at evening’, I have left it upon your luck!
If you are writing free software, choose your license appropriately. This can
make a big difference with respect to adoption of your software.I'll just show you an excerpt from a Debian changelog:
After reading some blogs today, I have noticed an unnatural obsession with large feed icons.
So, I hereby propose that feed icon sizes are derived based on the website creator’s perceived self-worth. So therefore, to optimize and convey to the world, the amount of psuedo-intellectual bullshit that is my blog, I have hereby rendered a new size of RSS icon, intended for only the most full of themselves people on all of the Internet (e.g. me).
The 512×512 feed icon. Isn’t it fantastic?
This rendering is distributed under the 
Today is again about removing packages from testing 
Installing Debian on your Eee PC is even easier now, as the option to 
Using Xfce on your laptop running Debian? The battery plugin is
unusable? Don't panic, we're aware of this.
Basically, the situation is a mess, for some reasons:
I thought the spanish region of Extremadura had 4 million inhabitants and 200000 computers running GNU/Linex, a custom Debian distribution. 
