Working With Rails

Redhillonrails Core

= RedHill on Rails Core

RedHill on Rails Core is a plugin that adds the following features:

• Generic support for foreign-keys;
• Mechanism for obtaining indexes directly from a model class; and
• A mechanism for determining when Schema.define() is running.

=== Foreign Key Support

The plugin provides two mechanisms for adding foreign keys as well as preserving foreign keys when performing a schema dump. (Using SQL-92 syntax and as such should be compatible with most databases that support foreign-key constraints.)

The first mechanism for creating foreign-keys allows you to add a foreign key when defining a table. For example:

create_table :orders do |t|
  ...
  t.foreign_key :customer_id, :customers, :id
end

You also have the option of specifying what to do on delete/update using :on_delete/:on_update, respectively to one of: :cascade; :restrict; and :set_null:

create_table :orders do |t|
  ...
  t.foreign_key :customer_id, :customers, :id, :on_delete => :set_null, :on_update => :cascade
end

The second method allows you to create arbitrary foreign-keys at any time:

add_foreign_key(:orders, :customer_id, :customers, :id, :on_delete => :set_null, :on_update => :cascade)

In either case, if your database supports deferred foreign keys (for example PostgreSQL) you can specify this as well:

t.foreign_key :customer_id, :customers, :id, :deferrable => true
add_foreign_key(:orders, :customer_id, :customers, :id, :deferrable => true)

By default, the foreign key will be assigned a name by the underlying database. However, if this doesn’t suit your needs, you can override the default assignment using the :name option:

add_foreign_key(:orders, :customer_id, :customers, :id, :on_delete => :set_null, :on_update => :cascade, :name => :orders_customer_id_foreign_key)

You can also query the foreign keys for a model yourself by calling foreign_keys():

Order.foreign_keys

Or for an arbitrary table by calling foreign_keys(table_name) on a database adapter.

Either method returns an array of the following meta-data:

• name – The name of the foreign key constraint;
• table_name – The table for which the foreign-key was generated;
• column_names – The column names in the table;
• references_table_name – The table referenced by the foreign-key; and
• references_column_names – The columns names in the referenced table.

If you need to drop a foreign-key, use:

remove_foreign_key :orders, :orders_ordered_by_id_fkey

The plugin also ensures that all foreign keys are output when performing a schema dump. This happens automatically when running rake migrate or rake db:schema:dump. This has particular implications when running unit tests that contain fixtures. To ensure the test data is correctly reset after each test, you should list your fixtures in order of parent->child. For example:

fixtures :customers, :products, :orders, :order_lines

Rails will then set-up and tear-down the fixtures in the correct sequence.

The plugin fully supports and understands the following active-record configuration properties:

• config.active_record.pluralize_table_names
• config.active_record.table_name_prefix
• config.active_record.table_name_suffix

=== Model Indexes

ActiveRecord::Base already provides a method on connection for obtaining the indexes for a given table. This plugin now makes it possible to obtain the indexes for a given model-ActiveRecord::Base-class. For example:

Invoice.indexes

Would return all the indexes for the invoices table.

=== Schema Defining

The plugin also adds a method-defining?()-to ActiveRecord::Schema to indicate when define() is running. This is necessary as some migration plugins must change their behaviour accordingly.

=== Case-insensitive Indexes

For PostgreSQL, you can add an option :case_sensitive => false to add_index which will generate an expression index of the form:

LOWER(column_name)

This means finder queries of the form:

WHERE LOWER(column_name) = LOWER(?)

are able to use the indexes rather require, in the worst case, full-table scans.

Note also that this ties in well with Rails built-in support for case-insensitive searching:

validates_uniqueness_of :name, :case_sensitive => false

=== See Also

• Foreign Key Associations (foreign_key_associations)
• Foreign Key Migrations (foreign_key_migrations)
• Row Version Migrations (row_version_migrations)
• Schema Validations (schema_validations)

=== License

This plugin is copyright 2006 by RedHill Consulting, Pty. Ltd. and is released under the MIT license.

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly