How to customize Rails 3 STI column name

Question

I have a class named Post:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
end

I have a class named Question that inheriting f

Answer 1

You can change the name of the single table inheritance column like so:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  self.inheritance_column = 'type_column_name'

end

However, there is no way to cause Rails to use integers instead of storing the actual type as a string, which makes me think that this may not be a great use case for single target inheritance. Perhaps a scope would suit you better instead:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :questions, where(:post_type_id => 0)
  scope :answers, where(:post_type_id => 1)

end

@questions = Post.questions.all
@answers = Post.answers.all