STI Inheiritance in Rails. Issues with find.

Question

I am having an issue with searching for records in my STI table due to my inheritance structure

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

---

class LegacyUser < User

class AuthUser < User

---

class SuperUser < AuthUser

class FieldUser < AuthUser

class ClientAdmin < AuthUser

---

The problem is that find does not work for the AuthUser Model. The query is looking for type "AuthUser" and does not include the other three possibilities.

Edit: While playing around with this it started to work but only for ClientAdmin and FieldUser so it seems this functionality should be build in. but now it has gone back to the original issue

Answer 1

Due to the way STI works in Rails (it stores the model name in a database column called 'type') I don't see how it can support the hierarchy you describe above - I think you are limited to a single level hierarchy.

Answer 2

Is the AuthUser model going to be used by itself?

If it is only a class for shared methods between the inherited classes you could try to set it as an abstract class. That way ActiveRecord might pass right through it.

In the declaration of AuthUser, just add self.abstract_class = true like this:

class AuthUser < User
     self.abstract_class = true
end

I do not know if that works in this scenario, but it could be worth a try.