rails: create scaffold for models to inherit from superclass?
model, ruby, ruby-on-rails, ruby-on-rails-3, scaffolding
Solution
This is something I've thought about doing with my application. I haven't done it yet, and I wouldn't recommend it if you are new to rails. I would either make separate models entirely, or make one model, and have the attribute `gender`, which should be either a 0 or a 1, and then make a method that returns the string for the corresponding gender.
EDIT
So I opened up the rails console, and from what I could see, it is possible totally possible, all you need to do is declare the class, and if you want to use different tables, `set_table_name`
class This < That
set_table_name :this
end
class There < This
set_table_name :there
end
Or you could use one table, but if your trying to stay DRY, I would use two.
If you want to use the scaffold generator, you will have to run the typical `rails g scaffold Men` for each class you want views for (men and women). The model that this generates inherits from the `ActiveRecord::Base` class. The inheritance marker is the less than symbol (`<`).
# THESE WILL BE THE DEFAULT GENERATED MODELS
class Men < ActiveRecord::Base
end
class Women < ActiveRecord::Base
end
You will then manually create the super class `User`
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
end
and then edit the `Men` and `Women` models to inherit from `User`
# men.rb
class Men < User
end
# women.rb
class Women < User
end
lets say you wanted to subclass with one table, you could would right the migrations for that table, and then add the `attr_accessible` to the appropriate subclass.
`attr_accessible` is a rails security feature. It determines which attributes may be set in mass assignment. Anything related to security, site rank, etc. should not be accessible.
Example:
attr_accessible :favorite_food, :interests, :password, :email # THIS IS GOOD
attr_accessible :admin, :has_access_to_missile_launch_codes # THIS IS BAD
because then someone could undermine your security system by passing
`params => { :man => { :admin => true }}`
The main point is that using these `attr_accessible` will determine which type of user can set what. Obviously you can DRY this up by putting shared features in the super-class. Hope this helps
You should also read about the `super` keyword, and the `self` keyword. If your running an inherited setup you will eventually want to use these.
Problem
I'm new to Rails, still getting my feet wet, so please pardon me if this is either trivial or "the wrong way" to do things. I'd like to create a superclass for some scaffolded models. For example, I'd like to create a scaffold for `Men` and for `Women`, but I want them both to inherit from a `People` superclass; `Men` and `Women` would inherit fields like `height` and `weight` from the `People` class. Where/how do I define this `People` superclass? How do I define the subclasses `Men` and `Women` via scaffolding?