Has_one not working as expected?

I messed around with Rails for a while last year, but then got busy and
had to drop it. However, I now have time again, so I’m starting to play
around with a simple database schema to model my extensive collection of
photographic material, including equipment, negatives, photographs,
etc. I’m running into an issue with using belongs_to/has_one methods.
Read on for an explanation…

I have two postgres database tables, defined as follows:

photo_dev=> \d manufacturers
Table “public.manufacturers”
Column | Type |
Modifiers
--------±-----------------------±--------------------------------------------------------------
id | integer | not null default
nextval(‘public.manufacturers_id_seq’::text)
name | character varying(255) | not null
Indexes:
“manufacturers_pkey” primary key, btree (id)

photo_dev=> \d filters
Table “public.filters”
Column | Type |
Modifiers
-----------------±-----------------------±--------------------------------------------------------
id | integer | not null default
nextval(‘public.filters_id_seq’::text)
name | character varying(255) | not null
filter_factor | numeric(2,1) | not null
manufacturer_id | integer | not null
description | character varying(50) | not null
Indexes:
“filters_pkey” primary key, btree (id)
Foreign-key constraints:
“$1” FOREIGN KEY (manufacturer_id) REFERENCES manufacturers(id) ON
DELETE CASCADE

The tables contain this test data:

photo_dev=> select * from filters;
id | name | filter_factor | manufacturer_id | description
----±-----------±--------------±----------------±------------
24 | Lee Filter | 3.0 | 5 | Deep Red
(2 rows)

photo_dev=> select * from manufacturers;
id | name
----±-----
5 | Lee
(1 row)

I’ve cobbled together this test file:
#!/usr/bin/ruby

require ‘pp’
require ‘rubygems’
require_gem ‘activerecord’

ActiveRecord::Base::establish_connection( :adapter => ‘postgresql’,
:host => ‘localhost’,
:database => ‘photo_dev’,
:username => ‘photo’,
:password => ‘photo’ )

class Manufacturer < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :filter
end

class Filter < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :manufacturer, :foreign_key => ‘id’
end

filter = Filter.find( 24 );
pp filter
print filter.manufacturer, “\n”

man = Manufacturer.find( filter.manufacturer_id );
pp man

The first problem I had was that placing this statement:

has_one :manufacturer

in the Filter class could cause invalid SQL to be generated when trying
to lookup the manufacturer. For example, I would have seen this SQL in
the stack trace:

SELECT * FROM manufacturers WHERE (manufacturers.filter_id = 24)

LIMIT 1

the wrong column name (manufacturers.filter_id) was used - I had to add
the :foreign_key => ‘id’ to fix the column name problem. Is this
normal, or have I defined the tables incorrectly? It appears that the
foreign key name assumed to also be the name of the primary key in the
child table, which breaks the assumption that all tables have a primary
key called ‘id’…

If I run the above script, I get the following output:

#<Filter:0x40559238
@attributes=
{“name”=>“Lee Filter”,
“manufacturer_id”=>“5”,
“filter_factor”=>“3.0”,
“id”=>“24”,
“description”=>“Deep Red”}>
nil
#<Manufacturer:0x40554698 @attributes={“name”=>“Lee”, “id”=>“5”}>

Calling filter.manufacturer is not finding the child record, yet if I
directly fetch the record, I can find it. What gives?

My guess is that the two problems are related, and something is borked
either in my code, or in my database definitions.

Anyone have any suggestions?

I’m running on Rails 1.0…

Cheers!

-klm.

I’m using the supplied scaffold.css file and in my layout I have a
transitional doctype:

Using this doctype and scaffold.css, when error_messages_for() is used,
the
styles don’t get applied. I believe it is due to the css using
#ErrorExplanaion and the actual id/class names are errorExplanation.
Note
the capitalization of the ‘E’ in error. Fixing the css allowed the
styles to
be applied to the default output of error_messages_for.

Should this be fixed?

Thanks.

Bob S.

Wow!

My scaffolding derived forms look a lot better now.

Thanks!

I think you need to file a bug report for this…


– Tom M.

Bug report submitted.

On Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 08:39:59PM -0700, Ken Miller wrote:

Calling filter.manufacturer is not finding the child record, yet if I
directly fetch the record, I can find it. What gives?

Your associations are reversed.

Instead of:

Filter
  has_one :manufacturer, ...

Manufacturer
  belongs_to :filter

Use:

Filter
  belongs_to :manufacturer

Manufacturer
  has_one :filter (or, has_many :filters)

The belongs_to association (whether in a one-to-one or one-to-many
relationship) always applies to the class whose table has the foreign
key referencing the other. In your case, your filters table has a FK
referencing the manufacturer. Ergo, Filter belongs_to Manufacturer. See
the API docs[1] for more examples.

Erik.

[1]
http://ar.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html

baz Scott wrote:

Thank you Bob, I spent hours trying to figure this out today and I got
it down to commenting out the doctype made errors work - but that just
confused me more, simple capitalisation, why is it always the simple
things that hurt the most?

Because that’s when you kick yourself the hardest :slight_smile:

Thank you Bob, I spent hours trying to figure this out today and I got
it down to commenting out the doctype made errors work - but that just
confused me more, simple capitalisation, why is it always the simple
things that hurt the most?

Bob S. wrote:

I’m using the supplied scaffold.css file and in my layout I have a
transitional doctype:

Using this doctype and scaffold.css, when error_messages_for() is used,
the
styles don’t get applied. I believe it is due to the css using
#ErrorExplanaion and the actual id/class names are errorExplanation.
Note
the capitalization of the ‘E’ in error. Fixing the css allowed the
styles to
be applied to the default output of error_messages_for.

Should this be fixed?

Thanks.

Bob S.