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Ruby Ruby on Rails 5 Basics Adding a Model Attribute Wrap Up

MaryAnn Eleanya
MaryAnn Eleanya
8,626 Points
Posted by MaryAnn Eleanya
MaryAnn Eleanya
8,626 Points

My post ID isn't updating

Every time I delete a post and add a new one the post id isn't updating. It just treats the post like a new instance. For example, I only have three posts in total but their post id says 11, 12, 13. How can I delete the post id so that it can start counting from ID:1.

2 Answers

Rogier Nitschelm
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.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Rogier Nitschelm
iOS Development Techdegree Student 5,461 Points
Rogier Nitschelm
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Rogier Nitschelm
iOS Development Techdegree Student 5,461 Points

The ID is not something you should care about in most cases. The assignment of id's is done by the database for you and this behaviour is expected. The id columns in your models (post in this case) are automatically incremented every time a new record is made. Old id's are not being reused.

This may seem odd at first but to give you an idea of why this is a good thing. Imagine your database consists of two tables:

  1. users
  2. bank accounts

imagine if you are user with id 10, and you have a bank account that refers to your user (by id). Imagine if one day you delete your user account. Your id would be available again. Imagine if the next person to make an account gets assigned your old id of 10. Your bank account would then be associated with the new user. And he might get access to your information.

It still is possible to reuse id's by manually setting the id on creation of a record or updating a record, but its not recommended. I recommend letting your database handle the assignment of id's.