Id (autoincrementing integer) vs string employee ID as primary key - rails application

Question

I'm writing my first rails app & want to get into some good habits from the start. The table in question is to be to hold employee data, one of the fields being the manager's ID. To reflect the hierarchical structure, I'm thinking of using acts_as_tree, so the parent_id would be the manager's id field (right?). If we are to use (import) data from our existing HR application - PeopleSoft - the employee ID is a string. Employee ID seems to make the most sense as a PK (coming from the PeopleSoft developer perspective, I realize I may be biased and/or not seeing all of the possibilities -- I welcome suggestions on this as well)

I know that one of the philosophies behind rails is "convention over configuration", so I'd like to use the defaults - the PK being the autoincrementing integer. Would it make sense in this case to create a "lookup table" or something in order to maintain the use/association of the ID coming from PS? There will be reports/exports going back into the PS world....

Thanks

Answer 1

You're correct in that the convention in Rails is to use the default auto-incrementing id. If you have a one-to-one relationship between people and employee IDs, then employee ID should just be a field (column) on your person model. Make it a key (but not a primary key) if you're going to be doing a lot of lookups using it.