Folks,
I’m fairly new to Rails, and I’ve Googled around for an answer to this
question with no luck…
Consider a little blog application that has uses single-table
inheritance for the handful of different content types via a Content
base class and subclasses like FooContent and BarContent. That part
all works well for me.
Now consider the view that presents actions to the user to create
different types of content, via links like “Create new Foo” and
“Create new Bar”. I want the application to automatically be aware of
the different types of content that are available so that, for
instance, this list of links in the view is dynamically generated. I
don’t want the app to have hard-coded in its initialization the
knowledge that there are two types of Content classes, FooContent and
BarContent.
Brielfy the Class.inherited method looked promising as a way to detect
subclassing, but doesn’t work for a couple of reasons including the
fact that Rails doesn’t appear to load the FooContent or BarContent
classes until ActiveRecord encounters a record of that type, which
produces a chicken-and-egg problem when the table doesn’t contain any
instances of a specific content class yet.
Other methods of putting code in the class definition for the
subclasses in order for them to register themselves as available
content types with the application will fail for the same reason.
So, any ideas? I’d like to be able to drop in a new type of content
without having to change the main application in order to use it.
Gavin