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

Tres Wong-Godfrey tres.wong-godfrey at saniq.com
Tue Nov 11 13:19:30 EST 2008


As of Rails 2.1 64 bit ints are supported in MySQL migrations.  
Formerly you needed to use a plugin to get this working in MySQL.

Rails 2.1.0 had some problems with the implementation, but in 2.1.1 I  
believe they have fixed the implementation to work the same as  
Postgres, so using :limit => 8 gets you bigint in mysql.

So something like this, should work under Rails 2.1.1 with no patching  
or plugins necessary:
       t.integer :facebook_id, :limit => 8, :null=> false



On Nov 11, 2008, at 10:08 AM, 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.
>
> 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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