'Dependent' question

Rails
1

In order for ‘dependent’ to work and all child records to be destroyed
when
parent is, does the child foreign key have to be the id of the parent
record
?
i.e.

parent table | id |
5

child table | id |parent_id|
1 5

or could the foreign key be another field that ties all the records
together, say a user_id ?

Stuart

–

2

On 10/23/06, Dark A. [email protected] wrote:

In order for ‘dependent’ to work and all child records to be destroyed when
parent is, does the child foreign key have to be the id of the parent record
?
i.e.

parent table | id |
5

child table | id |parent_id|
1 5

This is correct. In the relationship definition you can use the option
:dependent => :destroy, this will delete all the records in the child
table that refers back to its parent. If there are no other
dependencies of the child records then you can use :dependent =>
:delete_all option. This will issue the SQL query in one shot and
improve the efficiency.