In Ruby on Rails, if you have the association wrong in the models, will it affect your app if you only touch model.instance_variable?

Question

That is, if you have all the has_many, has_one, belongs_to, and has many ... :through and has_many_and_belongs_to wrong, but your program only touch the

model.instance_variable

but not

model.some_other_model    # or model.some_other_model.some_method_or_variable

will you app do anything wrong or do anything bad to the database? That is, if your association is defined wrong, will it not do anything wrong if you keep to that model but not "cross reference" another model?

Answer 1

Assuming the syntax is correct, an error about a bad association won't be thrown until you try to access that association.