dependent
'dependent' is an option used with association in rails.
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Association
An association is the relationship between models. There are associations like one-one, one-many, many-many. To represent association in rails, it uses has_many, belongs_to, has_one and has_and_belongs_to_many.
For Eg: Account model contains many Members. It is represented as:
In Account Model:
has_many :members
In Member Model:
belongs_to :account
dependent
In the above example if we delete one record from the accounts table it will affect the members table. The members table will contain the invalid account_id. In these situations we can use 'dependent'.
In Account Model:
has_many :members, :dependent => :destroy
It will automatically deletes all the dependent data from the models.