Ruby on Rails/ActiveRecord/Naming

Ruby on Rails Built-In Rails Tools/Command-Line Reference ActiveRecord/Migrations Naming Basics ActiveRecord uses convention for naming classes, tables and fields. Rails uses convention over configuration. ActiveRecord expects applications to follow certain naming conventions. These conventions extend from file naming, class naming, table naming and more. By default classes are singular, tables are plural, primary keys are id and foreign keys are table_id. Note: There are also certain names that are reserved and should not be used in your model for attributes outside of the conventions defined in Rails: lock_version type - This is only used when you have single table inheritance and must contain a class name id - Reserved for primary keys table_name_count - Reserved for counter cache position - Reserved for acts_as_list parent_id - Reserved for acts_as_tree lft - Reserved for acts_as_nested_set rgt - Reserved for acts_as_nested_set quote - Method in ActiveRecord::Base which is used to quote SQL template class Classes ActiveRecord classes are named in singular form. Tables Tables for ActiveRecord objects are named in plural form by default. This pluralization is often an initial point of contention for new Rails users. For a class named 'Dog', the default table name is 'Dogs'. If you need to change the table name there are several ways to override the default behavior. Set use_pluralization In config/environment.rb you can specify ActiveRecord::Base.use_pluralization = false. This will apply to all ActiveRecord objects. Use set_table_name You can call set_table_name to specify a custom table name for a particular model. For example: class Dog < ActiveRecord::Base set_table_name 'dog' end Override table_name You can also override the table_name method and return a value. For example: class Dog < ActiveRecord::Base def table_name 'dog' end end