Composite Primary Keys

→ Ruby on Rails

→ ActiveRecords

What

Ruby on Rails does not support composite primary keys. This free software is an extension
to the database layer of Rails – ActiveRecords – to support composite primary keys as transparently as possible.

Any Ruby script using ActiveRecords can use Composite Primary Keys with this library.

Installing

sudo gem install composite_primary_keys

Rails: Add the following to the bottom of your environment.rb file

require 'composite_primary_keys'

Ruby scripts: Add the following to the top of your script

require 'rubygems'
require 'composite_primary_keys'

The basics

A model with composite primary keys would look like…

class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base
  # set_primary_keys *keys - turns on composite key functionality
  set_primary_keys :user_id, :group_id
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :group
  has_many :statuses, :class_name => 'MembershipStatus', :foreign_key => [:user_id, :group_id]
end

A model associated with a composite key model would be defined like…

class MembershipStatus < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :membership, :foreign_key => [:user_id, :group_id]
end

That is, associations can include composite keys too. Nice.

Demonstration of usage

Once you’ve created your models to specify composite primary keys (such as the Membership class) and associations (such as MembershipStatus#membership), you can uses them like any normal model with associations.

But first, lets check out our primary keys.

MembershipStatus.primary_key # => "id"    # normal single key
Membership.primary_key  # => [:user_id, :group_id] # composite keys
Membership.primary_key.to_s # => "user_id,group_id"

Now we want to be able to find instances using the same syntax we always use for ActiveRecords…

MembershipStatus.find(1)    # single id returns single instance
=> <MembershipStatus:0x392a8c8 @attributes={"id"=>"1", "status"=>"Active"}>
Membership.find(1,1)  # composite ids returns single instance
=> <Membership:0x39218b0 @attributes={"user_id"=>"1", "group_id"=>"1"}>

Using Ruby on Rails? You’ll want to your url_for helpers
to convert composite keys into strings and back again…

Membership.find(:first).to_param # => "1,1"

And then use the string id within your controller to find the object again

params[:id] # => '1,1'
Membership.find(params[:id])
=> <Membership:0x3904288 @attributes={"user_id"=>"1", "group_id"=>"1"}>

That is, an ActiveRecord supporting composite keys behaves transparently
throughout your application. Just like a normal ActiveRecord.

Other tricks

Pass a list of composite ids to the #find method

Membership.find [1,1], [2,1]
=> [
  <Membership:0x394ade8 @attributes={"user_id"=>"1", "group_id"=>"1"}>, 
  <Membership:0x394ada0 @attributes={"user_id"=>"2", "group_id"=>"1"}>
]

Perform #count operations

MembershipStatus.find(:first).memberships.count # => 1

Routes with Rails

From Pete Sumskas:

I ran into one problem that I didn’t see mentioned on this list –
and I didn’t see any information about what I should do to address it in the
documentation (might have missed it).

The problem was that the urls being generated for a ‘show’ action (for
example) had a syntax like:

/controller/show/123000,Bu70

for a two-field composite PK. The default routing would not match that,
so after working out how to do the routing I added:

map.connect ':controller/:action/:id', :id => /\w+(,\w+)*/

to my route.rb file.

Which databases?

A suite of unit tests have been run on the following databases supported by ActiveRecord:

Database	Test Success	User feedback
mysql	YES	YES (Yes! or No…)
sqlite3	YES	YES (Yes! or No…)
postgresql	YES	YES (Yes! or No…)
oracle	YES	YES (Yes! or No…)
sqlserver	??? (I can help)	??? (Yes! or No…)
db2	??? (I can help)	??? (Yes! or No…)
firebird	??? (I can help)	??? (Yes! or No…)
sybase	??? (I can help)	??? (Yes! or No…)
openbase	??? (I can help)	??? (Yes! or No…)
frontbase	??? (I can help)	??? (Yes! or No…)

Dr Nic’s Blog

http://www.drnicwilliams.com – for future announcements and
other stories and things.

Forum

http://groups.google.com/group/compositekeys

How to submit patches

Read the 8 steps for fixing other people’s code and for section 8b: Submit patch to Google Groups, use the Google Group above.

The source for this project is available via git. You can browse and/or fork the source, or to clone the project locally:

git clone git://github.com/drnic/composite_primary_keys.git

Licence

This code is free to use under the terms of the MIT licence.

Contact

Comments are welcome. Send an email to Dr Nic Williams.

Dr Nic, 21st January 2009
Theme extended from Paul Battley