activerecord - Rails Model Inheritance

Question

If I have a User and I want to make different types of users, say just normal users with only an email and subscribers who have a website field, how would I make subscribers inherit everything from Users with just an added field?

Answer 1

You would need to create a table with all of the fields, as well as specify a type column. i.e

create_table :users do |t|
  t.string :email
  t.string :website
  t.string :type
end

Then you can have classes like

Class User < ActiveRecord::Base

Class Subscriber < User

A subscriber will inherit everything from the Users model. The type column is there so that you can distinguish from the different models. For instance using

Subscriber.all 

Will only get subscribers, where as if you did not use the 'type' column it would also find users too.