Rails, Fixtures, Oracle, and Insert Errors
At work I've been struggling with making one of our projects play nice with Oracle. I got Oracle XE installed through Windows XP in Parallels and just couldn't make my tests work. I kept getting errors that Rails couln't insert a nil value into a non-nil field (id).
What this eventually boiled down to is Rails fixtures MUST have an id attribute on them or you may run into errors! This was hidden behind the scenes since heretofore we were using auto_incrementing MySQL fields. To get this behaviour in Oracle one must do
-
select #{table_name}_seq.nextval id from dual
(done by Rails automatically, normally) or set up a Trigger (not done by rails, and would have to be done in a create_table migration).
However, fixtures bypass the normal ActiveRecord::Base#create call and just does a raw execute insert into... Which means there's no value for id, unless it's specified in the fixture. This kept me at it for hours today and I only found it by hacking the fixtures source to make it print in the logs what it was doing!
Let this be a lesson! Always put in ids even if you don't care about their values.
