Case Sensitivity and ID Field Naming

Hi,

I am working with an existing database that has table and field names
such as ‘TblUsers’ and ‘txtEmailAddress’. Is rails sensitive to the case
of the letters here? or can I simply refer to these tables and fields as
‘tblusers’ and ‘txtemailaddress’ in my controllers ad rhtml files?

Also, the database has id fields named after the tables such as
‘TblUsersID’ for ‘TblUsers’. I know rails prefers id fields to be named
‘id’. How difficult is it to override this?
If I can override it, does every instance of ‘id’ become ‘TblUsersID’?
eg. in the following example, would this be correct?

Title

Thank you in advance!

Alana

On Friday 07 April 2006 12:02, Alana wrote:

If I can override it, does every instance of ‘id’ become ‘TblUsersID’?

Thank you in advance!

Alana

In every model, you can execute set_primary_key. So, for your
‘TblUsers’, you
can do

set_primary_key(:TblUsersID)

When you have done that, you can call .id on your objects, because it
maps to
the primary key. Calling “tbluserid” as you did in your example is not
necessary (it won’t even work I guess, mostly because it should be
TblUsersID…), the primary key is always “id”.

And, it is indeed case sensitive. You could have tried that out easily
:slight_smile:

BTW, you don’t have to specify the HTML tags for the form and fields
yourself.
If you make use of the helpers (like “text_field”), it creates the
necessary
HTML for you. Also, if you adhere to the standard naming convention,
handling
the data becomes much easier. The text_field method for example takes as
the
first two arguments the object and the method. If for example you use
“post”
and object and “title” as method, it will create a textfield
post[title]. This
way, when you have a lot of textfields for the object post, you can
simply do
“post.attributes = @params[“post”]”, to have them assigned all at once.
But, I
guess the latter you already knew, looking at your code.

See http://api.rubyonrails.com/ for more info on the details of the
methods I
mentioned.

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 12:02:28PM +0200, Alana wrote:

I am working with an existing database that has table and field names
such as ‘TblUsers’ and ‘txtEmailAddress’. Is rails sensitive to the case
of the letters here? or can I simply refer to these tables and fields as
‘tblusers’ and ‘txtemailaddress’ in my controllers ad rhtml files?

Unfortunately, Rails is sensitive to the case of table and field
names. I recently developed an application that had to deal with
legacy table and field names, and also had to work with Postgres
databases created with all lowercase names, and with Mysql databases
created with studlycased names. I ended up developing my application
to work against Postgres, and then adopting this code to work with
Mysql by redefining the table names and accessors when a Mysql
database was in use. This involved augmenting each model definition,
as for instance:

class Jobmedia < ActiveRecord::Base
  Jobmedia.table_name = 'jobmedia'
  Jobmedia.primary_key = 'jobmediaid'

  if STUDLY
Jobmedia.table_name = 'JobMedia'
def volumename; self.VolumeName; end
...
  end
end

… and then determining if studlification was required in
environment.rb:

STUDLY = ActiveRecord::Base.configurations[RAILS_ENV]['adapter'] == 

‘mysql’

It would be very handy if the Active Record framework provided some
type of “downcase fieldnames” option when generating the setter and
getter methods, but this approach got the job done for me. Best of
luck.

– John Kodis.