Change the value stored in inheritance_column

rubyonrails-talk
#1

I have been struggling for quite sometime with this.

Is there any way to configure the Model to store user defined value in
the inheritance_column instead of the default value (which is
class_name)

The problem I have is like this:

I have a User model and there are different models which inherit from
this like Admin, Premium, Professional, etc.
Each of these inherited models are identified by a field named role_id
in the users table and it contains integer values for e.g. 1 for
Admin, 2 for Premium, 3 for Professional and so on.

I want to set this role_id field as the inheritance_column, which can
be easily done by specifying :inheritance_column => "role_id" in the
User Model. But how do I configure Rails to store these numerical
values in the role_id field, instead of the Class name?

I will really appreciate if anybody can help me out with this.

#2

Well you could overwrite those fields yourself, but then bad things would happen when you loaded one of those objects because Rails would try to create an instance of 1 instead of an instance of Admin. I don't believe there's any support for this in rails (not to say that it couldn't be done but you would have to change rails itself)

Fred

#3

When I couldn't find it in the documentation, I thought that it might
be the case.

Rails has strong opinion about certain things and if you try to work-
around then it makes the life miserable.