How to implement Active Record inheritance in Ruby on Rails?

Question

How to implement inheritance with active records?

For example, I want a class Animal, class Dog, and class Cat.

How would the model and the database table ma

Answer 1

ActiveRecord supports mapping inheritance hierarchies to a single table(Single-table inheritance. Table would have a column type which stores name of actual class and is used to select other class-specific columns.

It is possible to implement multi-table inheritance mapping, as shown here, but this particular way is not portable, AFAIK.