STI, one controller

Question

I\'m new to rails and I\'m kind of stuck with this design problem, that might be easy to solve, but I don\'t get anywhere: I have two different kinds of advertisements: high

Answer 1

fl00r has a good solution, however I would make one adjustment.

This may or may not be required in your case. It depends on what behavior is changing in your STI models, especially validations & lifecycle hooks.

Add a private method to your controller to convert your type param to the actual class constant you want to use:

def ad_type
  params[:type].constantize
end

The above is insecure, however. Add a whitelist of types:

def ad_types
  [MyType, MyType2]
end

def ad_type
  params[:type].constantize if params[:type].in? ad_types
end

More on the rails constantize method here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Inflector.html#method-i-constantize

Then in the controller actions you can do:

def new
  ad_type.new
end

def create
  ad_type.new(params)
  # ...
end

def index
  ad_type.all
end

And now you are using the actual class with the correct behavior instead of the parent class with the attribute type set.