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I have been struggling for the past few hours thinking about which route I should go. I have a Notification model. Up until now I have used a notification_type column to manage the types but I think it will be better to create separate classes for the types of notifications as they behave differently.
Right now, there are 3 ways notifications can get sent out: SMS, Twitter, Email
Each notification would have:
id
subject
message
valediction
sent_people_count
deliver_by
geotarget
event_id
list_id
processed_at
deleted_at
created_at
updated_at
Seems like STI is a good candidate right? Of course Twitter/SMS won't have a subject and Twitter won't have a sent_people_count, valediction. I would say in this case they share most of their fields. However what if I add a "reply_to" field for twitter and a boolean for DM?
My point here is that right now STI makes sense but is this a case where I may be kicking myself in the future for not just starting with MTI?
To further complicate things, I want a Newsletter model which is sort of a notification but the difference is that it won't use event_id or deliver_by.
I could see all subclasses of notification using about 2/3 of the notification base class fields. Is STI a no-brainer, or should I use MTI?
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Use STI When The Subclasses Have The Same Fields/Columns But Different Behavior. A good indication that STI is right is when the different subclasses have the same fields/columns but different methods. In the accounts example above, we expect all the columns in the database to be used by each subclass.
Single-table inheritance (STI) is the practice of storing multiple types of values in the same table, where each record includes a field indicating its type, and the table includes a column for every field of all the types it stores.
To get started with STI from a database perspective, all you need to do is add a field called “type” to the table. Rails takes this type field and applies the name of the sub-classes that inherit from the class for which the table is named as the value for a row of data.
Given the limited info, I'd say stick with STI.
The key question is: Are there places in your app where you want to consider all types of Notifications together? If so, then that's a strong sign that you want to stick with STI.
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