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ruby-on-railspostgresqlsublimetext2better-errors-gem

ERROR: delete on table violates foreign key constraint. Key id is still referenced from table (many)

I'm working with Rails and PostgreSQL and have a basic one-to-many relationship going on, one Auction has many Bids. However when I try and delete an auction (that has bids present) I get the following error:

ERROR: update or delete on table "auctions" violates foreign key constraint "fk_rails_43e9021cbf" on table "bids". DETAIL: Key(id)=(1) is still referenced from table "bids".

Deleting auctions with no bids gives no error.

The part that confuses me is that inside my Auction model, I have:

has_many :bids, dependent: :destroy

Error Screen Shot (better_error gem)

Since I have a dependent destroy clause, why am I still getting this error?

EDIT: I've tried dropping the whole DB, then recreating/re-migrating everything - still get the same error.

Solution

  • My issue was that i am using @auction.delete (visible in the screenshot I posted) when trying to remove a record.

    Delete will ignore any callbacks I have in place. So even though I have a dependent destroy clause, it is not being called - hence Rails is throwing an error. If/When I changed the code to read @auction.destroy, the call-back got invoked and it solved the problem.

    Reference: Difference between Destroy and Delete