If you need to use an explicit primary key and not an AUTO_INCREMENT with ActiveRecord I wrote this snippet that has proved very handy:
module ExplicitPrimaryKey attr_accessor :pk def before_create; self.id = pk; end end
Then when you call the create
method supply :pk => value
along with the other values.
ActiveRecord is an ORM solution that grew out of Ruby on Rails. It is entirely separate and can be used outside of Rails.