Perry Smith

Files is an Active Record model that has a reference to its parent of the same type:

class Files < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :parent, class_name: "Files"
end

I want to create a root entry whose parent is itself (which mimics the root directory which has .. that points to itself).

I have tried several various things most of which end up trying to save the record to the database with the parent still set to null. The db is set up to throw an exception if that field is null. I've tried:

Files.new { |f|
  f.parent   = f
}.save

and

Files.create { |f|
  f.parent   = f
}

I've also tried

Files.new { |f|
  f.parent_id = f.id = Files.next_sequence_value
}.save

And I have looked at build_parent