I have a legacy SQL schema which looks something like this: CREATE TABLE `User`

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Asked: May 26, 20262026-05-26T06:41:07+00:00 2026-05-26T06:41:07+00:00

I have a legacy SQL schema which looks something like this: CREATE TABLE `User`

0

I have a legacy SQL schema which looks something like this:

CREATE TABLE `User` (
  `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `userType` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `seqNo` int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=30 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

CREATE TABLE `Employee` (
  `userType` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
  `employeeNumber` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `FKB65C8D4DB07F537D` (`id`),
  CONSTRAINT `FKB65C8D4DB07F537D` FOREIGN KEY (`id`) REFERENCES `User` (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

In this design, an Employee is-a User in the domain model. i.e. The employee’s “id” field is a foreign key which references User.id.

How would I encode this relationship with Rails 3.0 models and migrations?
For example, if I ran

rails g scaffold User userType:string seqNo:integer

it would get me a Rails database migration which would generate a very similar schema, and a model which could access that table. However I am not sure what to do to get the Employee table with Employee.id as a foreign key referring to User.id, as well as getting an Employee model which can access both tables.

How can I accomplish this?