Question

Suppose I want to determine if Admin inherits from ActiveRecord::Base. One way is to do this is Admin.new.kind_of? ActiveRecord::Base, but that instantiates an unused Admin object.

Is there an easy way of doing this without creating an Admin object?

Thanks

Answer 1

Sure, just compare the two classes:

if Admin < ActiveRecord::Base
  # ...
end

It is interesting to note that while Module#< will return true if Admin inherits from AR::Base, it will return false or nil if that’s not the case. false means that it is the otherway around, while nil is for unrelated classes (e.g. String < Range returns nil).