Abstract_class causes find to add "and foo."type" = 'Foo'"

Rails
1

rails 1.2.5

I’ve an abstract class as subclass of ActiveRecord::Base . Like this:

class SomeAbstractModel < ActiveRecord::Base
self.abstract_class = true
end

I’ve a table Foo with a column “type”, since I’ve subclasses of Foo.

If this class is defined like this
class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
end

a simple select produces this query:

Foo.find(1)

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE (foo.“id” = 1)

If I change the superclass of Foo to my Abstract Model:
class Foo < SomeAbstractModel
end

the simple select produces now a different query

Foo.find(1)

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE (foo.“id” = 1) AND ( (foo.“type” = ‘Foo’ ) )

This leads to my problem, since I’ve some rows where the type is NULL.
Why does ActiveRecord behave like that? Well,
Foo.superclass.abstract_class? returns true. Any thoughts?

2

Joachim G. wrote:

If this class is defined like this

the simple select produces now a different query

Foo.find(1)

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE (foo.“id” = 1) AND ( (foo.“type” = ‘Foo’ ) )

This leads to my problem, since I’ve some rows where the type is NULL.
Why does ActiveRecord behave like that? Well,
Foo.superclass.abstract_class? returns true. Any thoughts?

I have a patch to remove abstract classes from STI find conditions:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/9694

However this is just for the efficiency boost. Your type field
should never be NULL if you’re only creating non-abstract classes
in the STI hierarchy, unless it’s a legacy issue.

–
We develop, watch us RoR, in numbers too big to ignore.

3

Mark Reginald J. wrote:

Your type field
should never be NULL if you’re only creating non-abstract classes
in the STI hierarchy, unless it’s a legacy issue.
Well, yes it should be never NULL, but I’ve plenty of those rows where
type is NULL (all created by Model#save).
I currently cannot reproduce the problem, but it seems to occour in
production mode. Maybe because schema info is not updated properly.