Hi, I''ve noticed that by default AR#validate doesn''t check whether a given foreign key relationship is actually valid. So if you have a book and you set its author_id to some number that doesn''t correspond to an Author in the authors table, then it valid? will just return true. I guess this is a rare condition because normally the author_id would come from a pre-populated, but I just ran into this issue in one of my unit tests. So I guess my question is: is their an easy way to check if the associations exist before inserting/updating a record? Jeroen