Deleting records with children

[akiryk]

If I delete an object that has child objects, does rails automatically delete them as well or do I need to do it?

Say I have a model called Project and a model called Article. Project has_many articles and Article belongs_to a project. I can create a new article, but it only exists in the context of a project. Here is the destroy action from my ProjectController:

  def destroy
    @project = Project.find(params[:id])
    @project.destroy

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { redirect_to project_url }
      format.xml  { head :ok }
    end
  end

Should I add something in there that loops through all the child articles and deletes each one? If so, I'd guess that I would call a method in my model called something like kill_articles and pass it as an argument all the child articles. Any suggestions?

[Luke Redpath]

By default, no, Rails won't delete the children automatically. There is however a feature to do just that.

class Project
  has_many :articles, :dependent => :destroy
end

This will destroy all associated articles by calling the article's own destroy method. There are other options for :dependent - :delete_all also deletes all associated articles but does it with one SQL statement rather than calling article.destroy which means any destroy callbacks in your Article class will not be called. On the plus side its quicker. Finally you can use :nullify which will set the foreign key (project_id) of each article to null instead of deleting the records.

[akiryk]

That's just what I was looking for -- thanks!

It sounds like :delete_all is the better way to go unless for some reason I want or need to call each article's destroy action.

[CompressedAir]

Yep, exactly. If you have a special destroy action you would not use :delete_all.