Non-standard primary key column

Rails
1

Good day!
I’ve recently started to develop under rails.
I have a migration that should create a table, and I want the primary
key id to be not standard auto-incrementing integer but explicitly
given string.
I have language codes and language native names in the table so I don’t
want either to keep that meaningless integer id in the db or to have it
appear in the uri.
The first question is, does this seriously compromise rails’ magic?
Will scaffolding work?
The second question is, the migration doesn’t work as I suppose it
should.
It is

class CreateLanguages < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
create_table :languages, {:id=>false} do |t|
t.column :id, :string, {:limit=>12}
t.column :name, :string, {:limit=>60, :null=>false}
t.primary_key :id
end
end

But what is created is like the last line is ignored

id varchar(12) default NULL,
name varchar(60) NOT NULL

I’m using MySQL 5.0

Could you please clarify this behaviour and make a suggestion?

Your sincerely,
Damian/Three-eyed Fish

2

Yes, this seriously compromises rails’ magic. It expects an auto
incremented integer.

I’m not sure about the t.primary_key method, but this should work:

def self.up
execute “ALTER TABLE languages ADD id string(12) DEFAULT NULL PRIMARY
KEY”
end

A bit not-so-clean, though.

3

On Jan 18, 2007, at 14:58, [email protected] wrote:

Yes, this seriously compromises rails’ magic. It expects an auto
incremented integer.

Thank you!
I hope I will change my thinking and implement my system in a more
railish way.

Your sincerely,
Damian/Three-eyed Fish