Single table inheritance and find(:all) in parent

rubyonrails-talk
1

I understand how STI works, in that I have say a Post model that contains posts on a forum and several sub-posts like 'ordinaryUserPost' and 'adminUserPost' etc.

Now, I want to define the same method in each of the sub-posts, but the method would do something different in each case, eg

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base end

class AdminUserPost < Post   def background_color     'rockstar red'   end end

class ordinaryUserPost < Post   def background_color     'pale blue'   end end

(yes its a silly example). Now in my thread controller I do Post.find (:all) and it gives me a list of posts I need to render, but they are 'Post' objects, not AdminUserPost or OrdinaryUserPost - so I cannot just get my background_color method! I would have to do a find on each type of user post separately ...

Is there anyway I can do:

Post.find(:all)

And in the resultant array get a list of AdminUserPost and OrdinaryUserPost objects instead of Post objects?

Thanks,

Stephen.

2

Is there anyway I can do:

Post.find(:all)

And in the resultant array get a list of AdminUserPost and OrdinaryUserPost objects instead of Post objects?

That's the way it should work out of the box. Would be interesting to see the data / code that results in this not happening.

Fred

3

That's the way it should work out of the box. Would be interesting to see the data / code that results in this not happening.

I was being stupid - put my type column was actually called post_type, and I added self.inheritance_column = ''post_type' in all the child classes, but forgot the parent!