How to use an auto incremented primary key as a foreign key as well?
It looks like you have the referencing and referenced tables in reverse. You may want to do:
ALTER TABLE `child ` ADD FOREIGN KEY (`parent_id`) REFERENCES `parent` (`id`);
You can also define the foreign key in the CREATE TABLE
statement, as follows:
CREATE TABLE `parent` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`data` text,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=3 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
CREATE TABLE `child` (
`parent_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`related_ids` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
KEY `parent_id` (`parent_id`),
KEY `related_ids` (`related_ids`),
FOREIGN KEY (`parent_id`) REFERENCES `parent`(`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
Test case:
INSERT INTO parent (`data`) VALUES ('test data 1');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
INSERT INTO parent (`data`) VALUES ('test data 2');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
INSERT INTO child (`parent_id`, `related_ids`) VALUES (1, 100);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
INSERT INTO child (`parent_id`, `related_ids`) VALUES (2, 100);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
INSERT INTO child (`parent_id`, `related_ids`) VALUES (3, 100);
ERROR 1452 (23000): Cannot add or update a child row:
a foreign key constraint fails