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

[Mike Mangino]

On Nov 11, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Lee Mallabone wrote:

> 2008/11/11 Joseph Durden <josephdurden at gmail.com>:
>> 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'm doing this at the moment. The biggest thing I was concerned about
> was the potential for facebook user IDs to be 64bit numbers. (I can't
> remember the official Facebook stance on ID size but I'm pretty sure
> they weren't ruling out 64bit IDs). Rails migrations don't seem to
> support 64bit values (on mysql at least) out-of-the-box.
>
> I worked around the issue by patching ActiveRecord. I added a snippet
> (attached) to environment.rb based on the following post and all seems
> fine to date:
> http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4422
>
> Use column type :int64_pk for your users table and :int64 for any
> foreign key columns.
>

For Mysql, just use :integer, :limit=>21

That forces the use of bigints. Facebook is using 64bit user ids.

Mike

> Lee.
>
>
>
> -- 
> Lee Mallabone.
> Director, Crossbone Systems Ltd.
>
> http://www.crossbonesystems.com/
> http://www.fonicmonkey.net/
> http://CambridgeWebHeads.ning.com/
> <mysql-64bit- 
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--
Mike Mangino
http://www.elevatedrails.com