Classy Inheritance provides two ActiveRecord methods: depends_on and can_be.
Depends_on allows you define another model for which the calling model requires. A common setup for this is User → Profile, where User.depends_on :profile, :attrs => [:first_name, :last_name, :email]
This will add pass through methods so you can access the profile attributes define via the @user object: @user.first_name. This also means you can do @user.first_name = “Andrew”. So, your view can be cleaned up by removing any calls/usage of the Profile class/object. Classy inheritance will validate and save the requisite object. You will also get a User.find_with_profile method that will automatically do the :include => :profile for you.
It also supports polymorphic associations (was actually the reason it was created). Please check out the site documentation for more details.
By the way, Classy Inheritance was written to use the methods exposed to developers such as belongs_to, validates_associated and so forth in order to avoid monkey patching the ActiveRecord code.
thanks, andy
