Question

I’m working on building a pretty simple site mainly as an exercise in
learning more about rails. You can see my rough progress at
statific.com. It’s working pretty much as I wanted it for
keeping track of server information, but now I’d like to expand it to
other things, next on the list being firewalls.

I can pretty easily duplicate all the models, views, etc.. that I have
for my servers. The problem I see with that is that it isn’t very DRY
since most of the code would look the same, the only difference would
be the attributes I have setup for firewalls would be different than
for servers.

I know in plain ruby this is pretty simple, you can have a ‘Product’
w/ common attributes (‘manufacturer’, ‘model’) and then have children
with more specific attributes. Does the same type of concept exist
for rails, or am I just over thinking this?

Answer 1

Use STI (please don’t poke me to death. I’m just kidding).

All common functionality should be moved to modules and included into different models (server, firewall, etc.) as needed. In this particular situation you could have a module Hardwareable and include it into your server and firewall models. And leave different attribute to appropriate models.