In fairness to Rails, it is not intended to be used to build over existing data models. You can absolutely coax ActiveRecord to store PKs using non-standard conventions, but if you want to benefit from the ecosystem, you aren't likely to have much luck if you stray from the ORM patterns.
This is 100% by design. Rails is an abstraction from Basecamp. The creator of Rails has frequently stated that it hit critical mass the moment they used it to launch their own product. If anyone else finds it useful, this is a happy side-benefit.
For those of us who find it useful, a big part of the Rails value proposition is that we embrace the concept of convention over configuration. That is, there is a name, place and strategy for most things you want to do. You can absolutely step out of these patterns, but then you are violating what we call the principle of least surprise. The upside of this standardization of expectation is that an arbitrary Rails developer can join your project and intuitively know where everything is. They will be productive almost immediately.
By collectively deciding that bikeshedding is an over-rated time waste, we go from 'rails new' to serving authenticated pages that display data very quickly.
As a rule of thumb, if you cannot find documentation to support what you're trying to do, it's very likely that you're trying to make Rails do something against its own conventions.
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In fairness to Rails, it is not intended to be used to build over existing data models. You can absolutely coax ActiveRecord to store PKs using non-standard conventions, but if you want to benefit from the ecosystem, you aren't likely to have much luck if you stray from the ORM patterns.
This is 100% by design. Rails is an abstraction from Basecamp. The creator of Rails has frequently stated that it hit critical mass the moment they used it to launch their own product. If anyone else finds it useful, this is a happy side-benefit.
For those of us who find it useful, a big part of the Rails value proposition is that we embrace the concept of convention over configuration. That is, there is a name, place and strategy for most things you want to do. You can absolutely step out of these patterns, but then you are violating what we call the principle of least surprise. The upside of this standardization of expectation is that an arbitrary Rails developer can join your project and intuitively know where everything is. They will be productive almost immediately.
By collectively deciding that bikeshedding is an over-rated time waste, we go from 'rails new' to serving authenticated pages that display data very quickly.
As a rule of thumb, if you cannot find documentation to support what you're trying to do, it's very likely that you're trying to make Rails do something against its own conventions.