overriding on Rails: tables, foreign keys

Jeff Williams wrote this in comment 16 at...

If you don’t have the benefit of getting to make well designed tables with sensible naming conventions, but instead have to deal with a database mess you have inherited, the following things can be helpful…

If you want to make a ‘Story’ ActiveRecord, but your table is not called ‘stories’ (but ‘story’ or worse…), then you can override the table name in the model using:

def self.table_name() “strange_table_name” end

The same thing applies for the table’s auto increment id column:

def self.primary_key() “strange_id_name” end

Also, when defining foreign keys the ‘foreign_key’ option can be used:

belongs_to :author, :foreign_key => “not_author_id”

thx & hth,

--Jerome