Inheritance Hierarchies

We end our discussion of the demo application with a brief description of the controller and model class hierarchies in Rails. This discussion will only make sense if you have some experience with object-oriented programming (OOP); if you haven’t studied OOP, feel free to skip this section. In particular, if you are unfamiliar with classes (discussed in Section 4.4), I suggest looping back to this section at a later time.

We start with the inheritance structure for models. Comparing Listing 2.12 and Listing 2.13, we see that both the User model and the Micropost model inherit (via the left angle bracket <) from ActiveRecord::Base, which is the base class for models provided by ActiveRecord; a diagram summarizing this relationship appears in Figure 2.16. It is by inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base that our model objects gain the ability to communicate with the database, treat the database columns as Ruby attributes, and so on.