STI where inheritance column values are not the same as the name of the class

Rails
1

I recently tried to retrofit STI on a database table that had already
existed for a while. Here’s a basic outline of the scenario.

  1. I had a class ‘Code’ and a database table ‘codes’.
  2. ‘Code’ had an attribute ‘units’, which could be either ‘$’ or ‘%’
  3. I wanted the STI classes to be Code::Dollar or Code::Percent

I successfully implemented this with the following:

class Code
self.inheritance_column = ‘units’

class << self
def find_sti_class(units)
unit_class_for[units]
end

def sti_name
  unit_class_for.invert[self]
end

def unit_class_for
  {
    '$' => Code::Dollar,
    '%' => Code::Percent
  }
end

end
end

This works perfectly if I use it in the following way:

Code::Dollar.new(initialization_hash)
Code::Percent.new(initialization_hash)

However, if I do just Code.new(units: ‘$’) or something.build(units:
‘$’),
I get an error like the following:

ActiveRecord::SubclassNotFound: Invalid single-table inheritance type: $
is not a subclass of Code

What I really want is for Code.new(units: ‘$’) to return me a
Code::Dollar
object.

I was able to trace the lookup of the class name into
ActiveRecord::Inheritance::ClassMethods#subclass_from_attrs. From there
I
could see that it was trying to build the class name from the units
value
in the database, which obviously doesn’t work as there isn’t a class
named
$ or %.

What I’m really trying to do is setup STI to work correctly when the
value
of the database column doesn’t correspond to a class name. As there is
already another method called find_sti_class, it seems curious that we
couldn’t use it inside of subclass_from_attrs in order to make it work
in
this way. I did try it and was successful, but as find_sti_class is a
private method, I did not submit a patch using this.

So, after all of that, I guess what I’m after is finding out if doing
such
a thing is possible in Rails as is. If not, would a patch to make it
possible be desired by people other than myself? And if that patch made
find_sti_class part of the public interface, would that be likely to be
accepted?