Professional Ruby on Rails™

6.2. Naming Unconventionally

ActiveRecord has a few useful class-level attributes that enable you to change the default relationship between table names and class names, and the default primary key names. You can't use them in this case, because they are class-level, and would apply to all ActiveRecord classes in the project, even the ones that have already been created against the traditional Rails database. However, it's worth listing them here (which I've done in the following table) because under somewhat different project parameters, they are very useful. Typically, you'd put these changes in your environent.rb file.

Attribute	Description
pluralize_tablenames	Defaults to true. If your database schema uses the singular form of the table name instead of the plural, set this value to false.
primary_key_prefix_type	Specifies common behavior for primary key names where the table name is used as part of the key. If the key names are of the form recipeid, this field should have the value :table_name. If the key names are of the form recipe_id, this field should have the value :table_name_with_underscore. The default is nil.
table_name_prefix	A common string at the beginning of each table name. For example, you could use the_.
table_name_suffix	A common string at the end of each table name. For example, you could use _table.

Because you can't use these defaults, the new IngredientData class needs to specify the table name and primary key name explicitly. Create an app/models/ingredient_data.rb ...