Belongs_to not working as expected

Rails
1

I’m using ActiveRecord 2.3.2. I have a class with a belongs_to
association like this:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :bar
end

It is valid for bar to be nil (thus, in the database, foos.bar_id can
be null). However, if I execute the following I get an error:

foo = Foo.new
foo.bar # => nil
foo.save!
foo.bar # expect nil but get error

The full error message is, “ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound (Couldn’t
find Bar without an ID)”. Tracing the code I see that
ActiveRecord::Base.find_from_ids(ids, options) is being called by
passing an array containing a single, nil, element for the ids
argument. Here is the method:

def find_from_ids(ids, options)
expects_array = ids.first.kind_of?(Array)
return ids.first if expects_array && ids.first.empty?

ids = ids.flatten.compact.uniq

case ids.size
  when 0
    raise RecordNotFound, "Couldn't find #{name} without an ID"
  when 1
    result = find_one(ids.first, options)
    expects_array ? [ result ] : result
  else
    find_some(ids, options)
end

end

Without delving further to assess other consequences, it seems to me
that either nil should be returned when ids.size == 0 or the line “ids
= ids.flatten.compact.uniq” should be replaced with:

ids = ids.flatten.uniq
return nil if ids.length == 1 && ids.first.nil?
ids.compact!

Any thoughts gratefully received!

Thanks,

Chris.

2

uberlordchris wrote:

I’m using ActiveRecord 2.3.2. I have a class with a belongs_to
association like this:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :bar
end

It is valid for bar to be nil (thus, in the database, foos.bar_id can
be null). However, if I execute the following I get an error:

foo = Foo.new
foo.bar # => nil
foo.save!
foo.bar # expect nil but get error

I just tried this myself with Rails 2.3.2 and it worked as expected so
I’m not sure what wrong.

What does your Foo table look like?

Mine is:

foos

|id|bar_id|name|created_at|updated_at|