How to create a rails habtm that deletes/destroys without error? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I created a simple example as a sanity check and still can not seem to destroy an item on either side of a has_and_belongs_to_many relationship in rails.
Whenever I try to delete an object from either table, I get the dreaded NameError / "uninitialized constant" error message.
To demonstrate, I created a sample rails app with a Boy class and Dog class. I used the basic scaffold for each and created a linking table called boys_dogs. I then added a simple before_save routine to create a new 'dog' any time a boy was created and establish a relationship, just to get things setup easily.
dog.rb
class Dog < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :Boys
end
boy.rb
class Boy < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :Dogs
def before_save
self.Dogs.build( :name => "Rover" )
end
end
schema.rb
ActiveRecord::Schema.define(:version => 20100118034401) do
create_table "boys", :force => true do |t|
t.string "name"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end
create_table "boys_dogs", :id => false, :force => true do |t|
t.integer "boy_id"
t.integer "dog_id"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end
create_table "dogs", :force => true do |t|
t.string "name"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end
end
I've seen lots of posts here and elsewhere about similar problems, but the solutions are normally using belongs_to and the plural/singular class names being confused. I don't think that is the case here, but I tried switching the habtm statement to use the singular name just to see if it helped (with no luck). I seem to be missing something simple here.
The actual error message is:
NameError in BoysController#destroy
uninitialized constant Boy::Dogs
The trace looks like:
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.4/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:105:in const_missing'
(eval):3:indestroy_without_callbacks'
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.4/lib/active_record/callbacks.rb:337:in destroy_without_transactions'
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.4/lib/active_record/transactions.rb:229:insend'
...
Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't see your destroy callback, but I do see a couple of problems. First, your associations need to be lowercase. So dog.rb should be:
class Dog < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :boys
end
and boy.rb should be:
class Boy < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :dogs
def before_save
self.dogs.build( :name => "Rover" )
end
end
Second, I believe you want to use self.dogs.create instead of self.dogs.build above, since build won't actually save the new dog object.

Answer 2

The accepted answer here solved my problem, only to create another one.
Here are my model objects:
class Complex < ActiveRecord::Base
set_table_name "Complexes"
set_primary_key "ComplexID"
has_and_belongs_to_many :amenities
end
class Amenity < ActiveRecord::Base
set_table_name "Amenities"
set_primary_key "AmenityID"
end
Rails uses the name of the association as the table name when creating the select query. My application runs on Unix against a legacy MySQL database and my table names are case-sensitive and don't conform to Rails conventions. Whenever my app actually tried to load the association, I would get an exception that MySQL couldn't find table amenities:
SELECT * FROM `amenities`
INNER JOIN `ComplexAmenities` ON `amenities`.AmenityID = `ComplexAmenities`.AmenityID
WHERE (`ComplexAmenities`.ComplexID = 147 )
I searched and searched and could not find a way to tell Rails to use the correct case for the table name. Out of desperation, I tried passing a :table_name option to habtm and it worked. My new Complex model looks like this:
class Complex < ActiveRecord::Base
set_table_name "Complexes"
set_primary_key "ComplexID"
has_and_belongs_to_many :amenities, :table_name => 'Amenities'
end
This works under Rails 2.3.5.
This option is not mentioned in the Ruby on Rails docs.