How to implement Active Record inheritance in Ruby on Rails?

Rails supports Single Table Inheritance.

From the AR docs:

Active Record allows inheritance by storing the name of the class in a column that by default is named "type" (can be changed by overwriting Base.inheritance_column). This means that an inheritance looking like this:

class Company < ActiveRecord::Base; end   
class Firm < Company; end  
class Client < Company; end   
class PriorityClient < Client; end

When you do Firm.create(:name => "37signals"), this record will be saved in the companies table with type = "Firm". You can then fetch this row again using Company.find(:first, "name = ‘37signals’") and it will return a Firm object.

If you don‘t have a type column defined in your table, single-table inheritance won‘t be triggered. In that case, it‘ll work just like normal subclasses with no special magic for differentiating between them or reloading the right type with find.

A pretty good tutorial is here: http://juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2006/06/03/rails-single-table-inheritance/

Models:

class Animal < ActiveRecord::Base; end
class Dog < Animal; end
class Cat < Animal; end

Migration:

class CreateAnimals < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :animals do |t|
      # Other attributes...
      t.string :type
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :animals
  end
end

ActiveRecord supports mapping inheritance hierarchies to a single table(Single-table inheritance. Table would have a column type which stores name of actual class and is used to select other class-specific columns.

It is possible to implement multi-table inheritance mapping, as shown here, but this particular way is not portable, AFAIK.

Delegated Types

One particular way of doing this is via Delegated Types - this makes sense only if you want to paginate all animals together, and to view cats and dogs together, then the delegated type is particularly useful. I also like it because you don't need to have empty columns, for where it doesn't make sense, as is the case with Single Table Inheritance solutions.

# Schema: entries[ id, created_at, updated_at, animalable_type, animalable_id ]  

class Animal < ApplicationRecord
  delegated_type :animalable, types: %w[ Cat Dog ]
end

module Animalable
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  included do
    has_one :animal, as: :animalable, touch: true
  end
end

# Schema: cats[ id, selfishness_level ]
class Cat < ApplicationRecord
  include Animalable
end

# Schema: dogs[ id, favourite_game, wag_tail_level ]
class Dog < ApplicationRecord
  include Animalable
end