# ActiveRecord :dependent problem **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 25, 2007, 6:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activerecord-dependent-problem/90048 "2007-03-25T18:21:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![christian](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@christian](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/christian)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2007, 6:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activerecord-dependent-problem/90048/1 "2007-03-25T18:21:41Z")
Hey guys, I have trouble with the ActiveRecord dependent option, I guess it’s a bug in ActiveRecord. I have a superclass called ‘list’ which has to subclasses ‘hard\_list’ and ‘intelligent\_list’. I’m working with single table inheritance and it works well. There is a table called lists, which holds information about my lists, a table called items, which has all the list items and a table called lists\_items, which knows what item belogs to what list. Now the problem: my intelligent\_list does not have items in that lists\_item table since its items are fetched with an user-defined SQL query. I used :finder\_sql for that and it works fine. But when I want to delete that list, ActiveRecord tries to nullify the corresponding entries in my lists\_items table. Because I have that intelligent list, there are no items stored, but that query would not be a problem, it would just do nothing but it doesnt work. Rails tries to find the items in lists\_items by the field intelligent\_list\_id since the has\_many definition is in the intelligent\_list class. This behavoir is wrong because the key is called list\_id (I’m using single table inheritance), so how can I avoid that query? How can I tell active record not to do anything with items in that lists\_items table? Or are there other solutions? The only thing I see right now to avoid that SQL error is adding an intelligent\_list\_id column, but that kinda sucks 🙂