Customize Rails Belongs_to Association Column Name

When working with Rails, you may encounter a situation where you need to customize the name of the foreign key column in a belongs_to association. By default, Rails assumes that the foreign key column name is the name of the associated model with the suffix "_id". However, this may not always be the case.

To customize the foreign key column name, you can pass the option ":foreign_key" to the belongs_to method. For example, let's say we have a User model that belongs_to a Role model, but the foreign key column name should be "role_key" instead of "role_id". We can modify the association like this:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :role, foreign_key: "role_key"
end

This will tell Rails to use "role_key" as the foreign key column name instead of the default "role_id". It's important to note that the foreign key column name must exist in the associated table, otherwise you will encounter errors.

In summary, customizing the foreign key column name in a belongs_to association is a simple task in Rails. Just pass the option ":foreign_key" to the belongs_to method and specify the desired column name. This can be useful in situations where the default naming convention doesn't fit your database schema.