[Facebooker-talk] Overriding id with facebook_id???

[Mike Mangino]

On Nov 11, 2008, at 4:36 AM, Joseph Durden wrote:

> I am new to rails, and was wondering if there would be unknown  
> consequences for setting the user tables primary key to being the  
> facebook_id of a user.  I have implemented this funcionality, and  
> everything is working fine.  All associations etc.  What are the  
> risks if there are any of overridding the id with facebook_id?  Why  
> would I not want to do this?  I did this because, it seems easier to  
> look up a user by their facebook id rather than their id to get  
> their facebook id in associated table.  Meaning if I have an  
> association with a user has_many comments, and the comments has a  
> user_id column.  I think it is easiers looking up things with  
> facebook_ids rather than ids, as these can get confusing.  just one  
> less thing to worry about.

The typical reason for using a surrogate key is to guard against  
changes. In this case, there is a very low probability that Facebook  
will change the id of a user, so that's not a big deal.

What might be a bigger deal is supporting other platforms. If you  
choose to use the facebook_id as the primary key, what would happen if  
you wanted to add BEBO support?

Mike

>
>
> Does it matter what the order of insertions to the database for  
> creating new Users?
>
> Any insight would be wonderful.
>
> Graciously,
>
> Joe
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--
Mike Mangino
http://www.elevatedrails.com