Support table-per-class inheritance for ActiveRecord models

[behrangsa]

I had submitted this issue some time ago, but a douche nuzzle or something closed it before giving anybody a chance to view it.

Right now Rails only supports table-per-hierarchy inheritance strategy. Some ORM frameworks, such as Java Persistence API and Hibernate support other strategies as well, such as table-per-class. Some possible strategies are listed here for example.

Someone has implemented this using some hacks in ActiveRecord as well, details of which can be found here.

It would be nice if Rails had first-class support for table-per-class inheritance strategy.

[drogus]

From my point of view such feature should be maintained as a plugin, it looks like there is more than one way to do it and it will probably grow from the initial implementation presented in linked blog post.

[jeremyf]

@behrangsa I agree with @drogus that this should be a plugin. The AR hack is now a broken link, so I was looking at the other possible options. I'm also wondering if Ruby's Mixin architecture removes the necessity table-per-class strategy.

[drogus]

Closing this as there is no activity. If you still think that something like that should be in rails the easiest way is to implement it as a plugin and if the adoption is good there is a chance that it gets merged (and even if it's not, you can still use as a plugin).