How to share a model with other database models in rails 3 in a better way than Polymorphic Associations

Say we have:

class ProductProperties < ActiveRecord::Base
 belongs_to :sellable, :polymorphic => true, :dependent => :destroy
end

class Tee < ActiveRecord::Base
 has_one :product_properties, :as => :sellable, :autosave => true
end

class Pen < ActiveRecord::Base
 has_one :product_properties, :as => :sellable, :autosave => true
end

The we can address the product properties as: @Tee.productProperties.property or @Pen.productProperties.property

Is there a way to have access to simply @Tee.property and @Pen.property?

This would make it much simpler since Tee and Pen each have their own attributes (ex: @Pen.ownProperty)

So far my research lead me to this plugin: https://github.com/brunofrank/class-table-inheritance. Has anyone used this, and is using it a go开发者_开发问答od idea (my gut feeling is that this will break at every new rails release)?

Thanks!

One workaround would be to define a method to give you direct access to the inherited properties:

class Pen < ActiveRecord::Base
  def some_property
    product_properties.some_property
  end
end

# These calls are equivalent
@pen.some_property
@pen.product_properties.some_property

If you have a lot of properties, you'll probably want to do this dynamically:

class Pen < ActiveRecord::Base
  [ :property1, :property2, :property3 ].each do |property|
    define_method(:property) do
      product_properties.some_property
    end
  end
end

However, this sounds like a prime candidate for Single Table Inheritance. You create a parent model (Product) that your child models (Pen, Tee etc) inherit from. They have all the properties of Product, as well as their own specific properties.

Have a look online for a walk through tutorial.