Cannot update record with ActiveRecord (no rails) - ruby

Question

Hello I have the following table in my PostgreSQL database:
CREATE TABLE user_logins (token VARCHAR(512) NOT NULL, user_id UUID UNIQUE NOT NULL, create_date TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT clock_timestamp(), last_visit TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT clock_timestamp(), expire TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT clock_timestamp() + INTERVAL '30 DAYS');
For which I have the following ActiveRecord class
require "active_record"
class UserLogin < ActiveRecord::Base
end
I want to update the last_visit column, which I try to do like this:
def update_last_visited(user_token)
user_login = UserLogin.find_by(token: user_token)
if user_login == nil
return false
end
user_login.update(last_visit: Time.now.utc)
end
However, I get this error:
2023-02-19 11:55:21 - ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid - PG::SyntaxError: ERROR: zero-length delimited identifier at or near """"
LINE 1: ...logins" SET "last_visit" = $1 WHERE "user_logins"."" IS NULL
As I have understood ActiveRecord if I have the object ActiveRecord should be able to update the record, or have I miss understood something?
Should I instead do an update based on a where?
A minimal reproducible example:
require "active_record"
require "yaml"
require 'securerandom'
db_config_file = File.open("database.yml")
db_config = YAML::load(db_config_file)
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(db_config)
class UserLogin < ActiveRecord::Base
end
def update_last_visited(user_token)
user_login = UserLogin.find_by(token: user_token)
if user_login == nil
return false
end
user_login.update(last_visit: Time.now.utc)
end
user_login = UserLogin.new
user_login.token = "wompas"
user_login.user_id = SecureRandom.uuid
user_login.save
update_last_visited(user_login.token)
The database.yml file:
adapter: 'postgresql',
host: 'localhost',
port: 5432
username: 'user',
password: 'password',
database: 'dbname'
Note: The project does not utilise Rails, we only use ActiveRecord for its ORM capabilities.

Answer 1

Your UserLogin doesn't have a primary key. But ActiveRecord expects tables to have a primary key column named id per default. See Active Record Basics / Schema Conventions in the official Rails Guides.
In your example, it feels like the user_id can be used as a primary key, because is cannot be NULL and it must be unique. You can try to configure user_id to be used by as primary key by ActiveRecord like this.
class UserLogin < ActiveRecord::Base
self.primary_key = :user_id
end
But in general, I suggest not fighting the default conventions and would just add a bigint id column to that table. While it is possible to configure custom primary key columns, it makes everything a bit more complex because you will need to remember those custom setting in other use cases – like, for example, when defining association.