# Auto\_complete – create association to anot her model – handle foreign-keys - validation **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [July 26, 2010, 2:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/auto-complete-a-create-association-to-anot-her-model-a-handle-foreign-keys-validation/192214 "2010-07-26T14:50:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![bungart1978](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/77aa72/32.png) [@bungart1978](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/bungart1978)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2010, 2:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/auto-complete-a-create-association-to-anot-her-model-a-handle-foreign-keys-validation/192214/1 "2010-07-26T14:50:56Z")
Hello, In the app that I’m currently developing I want to use the auto\_complete plugin to create an association from the model “ticket” to the model “customer”. In the new ticket form I created the field “customer name” as an auto\_complete field. The controller handles the lookup on the name field of the customer model. As I retrieve the name of the customer in the new ticket form this parameter is passed to the create action in the ticket controller when I hit the create button. In the controller I lookup the name of the customer and create the association from the ticket model to the customer model in that way. This works fine for the moment as the name of the customer is unique. But what happens when the name of the customer is not unique? How can the controller know which customer to associate the model to when there are two costumers with the same name? In my opinion it would be a better solution to retrieve the customer.id beside the customer.name. Doing that would it make unnecessary to lookup the customer in the controller as the desired id of the customer is included in the params hash. Thinking a bit further I’m also wondering how to make validation work on the customer field. Is there a common solution to that problem? Does anyone have an idea? Thanks Marc