has_and_belongs_to_many double insert

This is a story about my work with GetUp, in particular the past week. It’s about a problem that I’ve been putting off help one of the guys (James) solve, it didn’t seem all that important to me. So last night I kind of promised that I’d sit down with him this morning and help him work out what it was. Hopefully it was something silly either of us did and it would only take us an hour.

You know how this story is going to end up already.

It didn’t take us an hour. It’s now 5pm and I’ve only just figured out what it was.

Symptoms

We have two models whose names aren’t important so excuse me if I use the name Person and Address to represent them. They are nothing of the sort. In their purest form to replicate this issue, they are defined like this:

class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :people
end

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :addresses
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :addresses    end

When we go to create a new Person record:

Person.create(:addresses_attributes => { "0" => { :suburb => "Camperdown" } })

It inserts 1 Person record, 1 Address record but 2 join table records.

So, wtf?

We originally thought it was a bug in our application. How, in all realities, could Rails have a bug, right?

Wrong!

I should know how many bugs Rails could have. I should have been more wary. I was not. And it bit me in the arse. So out of curiosity I googled the issue and saw that others came across it and then I tried checking out to v2.3.4, which worked!. So there was a regression between v2.3.5 and v2.3.4. A simple git bisect bad v2.3.5 with git bisect good v2.3.4 put me on the way to finding out what this was. A couple of bisects later, I found the offending commit was 6b2291f3, by Eloy Duran.

A "solution(?)"

So I generated an application to simply demonstrate that this was a 2.3.5 regression. As I say in the README, I suggest using 2-3-stable if this bothers you. Alternatively there’s always Rails 3, or simply specifying the :uniq => true option on your has_and_belongs_to_many.

That was a fun 7 hours.

As I found out this (the next) morning and Tim Riley points out in the comments the ticket for this bug is #3575 and the related commit is 146a7505 by Eloy Duran also. Freezing rails to v2.3.5 and git cherry-picking this commit into this frozen version fixes it.

Ryan Bigg