Rails — use type column without STI?

Question

I want to use a column called type without invoking Single Table Inheritance (STI) - I just want type to be a normal column that holds a Stri

Answer 1

You can override the STI column name using set_inheritance_column:

class Pancakes < ActiveRecord::Base
    set_inheritance_column 'something_you_will_not_use'
    #...
end

So pick some column name that you won't use for anything and feed that to set_inheritance_column.

Answer 2

In Rails 3.1 set_inheritance_column is deprecated, also you can just use nil as a name, like this:

class Pancakes < ActiveRecord::Base
    self.inheritance_column = nil
    #...
end

Answer 3

If you want to do this for all models, you can stick this in an initializer.

ActiveSupport.on_load(:active_record) do
  class ::ActiveRecord::Base
    # disable STI to allow columns named "type"
    self.inheritance_column = :_type_disabled
  end
end

Answer 4

Rails 4.x

I encountered the problem in a Rails 4 app, but in Rails 4 the set_inheritance_column method does not exist at all so you can't use it.

The solution that worked for me was to disable the single table inheritance by overriding ActiveRecord’s inheritance_column method, like this:

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base

  private

  def self.inheritance_column
    nil
  end

end

Hope it helps!

Answer 5

I know this question is rather old and this deviates a bit from the question you are asking, but what I always do whenever I feel the urge to name a column type or something_type is I search for a synonym of type and use that instead:

Here are a couple alternatives: kind, sort, variety, category, set, genre, species, order etc.