Beginning Rails 3

Chapter 5. Advanced Active Record: Enhancing Your Models

The previous chapter introduced the basics of Active Record and how to use it. This chapter delves more deeply into Active Record and teaches you how to enhance your models.

Model enhancement is a general term. It refers to endowing your models with attributes and capabilities that go beyond what you get from subclassing ActiveRecord::Base. A model contains all the logic that governs its citizenship in the world of your application. In the model, you can define how it interacts with other models, what a model should accept as a minimum amount of information for it to be considered valid, and other abilities and responsibilities.

Models need to relate to each other. In the real world, bank ...