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

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.