I have been up all night trying to solve this same problem, and I finally got it to work.
I'll use your tables to demonstrate what I did:: =================================== class Room < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :roomtype end class Roomtype < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :rooms, :primary_key => "t_name", :foreign_key => "type_name" end =================================== I tried this oh-so-many different ways, and the solution was as simple as this. Ideally, I would prefer to set the tables up so that they all receive the built-in Rails magic, but we have some legacy business logic where I can only relate some of the data we import (let's say we import it into "Room") on an old field that's a string datatype. It's so great to see this working. I am able to write methods in my model, and use it in web pages. I hope this helps someone! -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/bb2be54297fac237e690047ae6310753%40ruby-forum.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.