Id column for join table... kosher?

Rails
1

I’ve got two tables, bookmarks & tags. Using a
has_and_belongs_to_many association, I can do lookups using a join
table called bookmarks_tags. Two questions:

  1. Can I have a migration for my join tables? Rails seems to “know”
    about join tables implicitly from the associations, but if I do a
    rake migrate the join tables won’t be built. I’ve been creating them
    using SQL/by hand.

  2. Is there anything wrong with having an ‘id’ column on my join
    table? Rails expects:
    bookmark_id & tag_id

…but what if I want to reference individual joins? Can I do:
bookmark_id & tag_id & id

Does this mess anything up? The Agile book says don’t do it, articles
on the web say it’s OK. Who to believe?

Thanks for any/all advice!
-Jason

2

  1. migration
    create_table :bookmarks_tags, :id=>false do |t|
    t.column :bookmark_id. :integer
    t.column :tag_id, :integer
    end

  2. No ids on join tables. However, see has_many :through That lets
    you
    do a has_and_belongs_to_many using a model as the middle piece instead
    of a
    join table. Then you can have an id on that table. However, I would
    advise
    against this unless you have additional fields on the join

2.b Looks like you’re doing tagging. Have a look ath the
acts_as_taggable
plugin.
Peak Obsession(You
want the plugin, not the Gem!)

2 c. I don’t get your question about individual joins. With a HABTM
relationship, you just do

@bookmark = Bookmark.find(1)
@tags = @bookmark.tags

@bookmark.tags << Tag.create :name => "ajax"

…
etc

So what would you be doing with joins?

Hope some of that helps you.