[RoR] Multiple Inheritance

[HenriIV]

Hi,

Let's say that I have a Property class and subclasses like Home, Plot, Appartment...
but as there is no multiple inheritance in Ruby, how do I implement it in Rails? (a model is already a subclass of ActiveRecord::Base)

Mixins didn't seem to be appropriate, is Home < Property enough?

[33degrees]

You could just make Property a subclass of ActiveRecord::Base, and then extend the various properties from that?

[Luke Redpath]

I thought you could do multiple inheritance. This works:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class Bar < Foo
end

Is that even multiple inheritance?

[HenriIV]

It works but only displays Properties instead of Homes

[Luke Redpath]

Are you trying to use single-table inheritance? This should work automatically. You have a Property model which maps to a properties table, which has a column called "type". Values of type such as "home", "plot" etc. would then determine which subclass of Property is used.

The downside to this is that you have to store all of the columns that might be unique to your subclasses in the single properties table, with null values where they do not apply. The alternative is class table inheritance but Rails does not support this (yet).

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pa...bleInheritance

Google for RubyOnRails class table inheritance - there seems to be some stuff out there but nothing concrete at the moment.

[HenriIV]

Thanks for the tip, I'm gonna check this. I searched for abstract class + ruby without success