Really add foreign keys to core… [#1011802]

As #111011: Add foreign keys to core ended with just adding “foreign keys” as a documentation feature (and not actual foreign keys in the database), I would like to suggest actually implementing these in core.

A simple query like "ALTER TABLE dns_zones ADD FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES users (uid) ON DELETE CASCADE;" works on both PostgreSQL and MySQL, and since we now in Drupal 7 have InnoDB as the default database engine (and ditto for MySQL 5.5), this should be almost universally supported.

Comments

Comment #1

webchick

she/they

English

Vancouver 🇨🇦

CreditAttribution: webchick commented 31 December 2010 at 23:28

Version:

7.x-dev

» 8.x-dev

Maybe so, but not in 7. :)

Comment #2

JacobSingh CreditAttribution: JacobSingh commented 1 January 2011 at 14:40

Heh, I had the same gripe. It really makes it worse not better. If they are there for documentation, it should look like doc, not like code.

Comment #3

yched CreditAttribution: yched commented 1 January 2011 at 15:14

Last I heard, Ctools will rely on 'foreign keys' exposed by Field type schemas to automatically infer Panels-like 'relationships' from 'reference' style field types (file field, taxo field, nodereference field...). Maybe it's done already.

Meaning, FKs would be doc with an actual semantic impact.