Night[9]

Leveraging Frameworks: dependent => :destroy Be A Better Coder

Maybe you have some code like

model Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :bars
    before_destroy :clean_up_bars

    def clean_up_bars
       self.bars.destroy_all
    end
end

My main gripe with this, is that Rails provides an awesome way to clean up any thing that doesn’t make sense without a parent. Fortunately it is even super simple.

model Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :bars
    before_destroy :clean_up_bars, :dependent => :destroy
end

This will make it so that when your Foo instance is destroyed, it will also destroy each of the bars that belong to that Foo instance.

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Published

05 March 2012

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