Single table inheritance

Active Record allows inheritance by storing the name of the class in a column that by default is named “type” (can be changed by overwriting Base.inheritance_column). This means that an inheritance looking like this:

class Company < ActiveRecord::Base; end
class Firm < Company; end
class Client < Company; end
class PriorityClient < Client; end

When you do Firm.create(:name => "37signals"), this record will be saved in the companies table with type = “Firm”. You can then fetch this row again using Company.where(:name => '37signals').first and it will return a Firm object.

If you don’t have a type column defined in your table, single-table inheritance won’t be triggered. In that case, it’ll work just like normal subclasses with no special magic for differentiating between them or reloading the right type with find.