Rails - Apr 2008 - Overriding to_xml() - Why Does This Work?

In Chapter 5 of his book, Flexible Rails, Peter Armstrong''s leads his
readers through an exercise to override the behavior of to_xml() in
ActiveRecord objects so that :dasherize would be false by default.  I
found his solution inelegant.  I came up with a more elegant one, and
it seems to work.

All I did was add the following to the very end of myapp/config/
environment.rb:

class ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_xml(options=nil, &block)
    super options == nil ? { :dasherize => false } :
options.merge(:dasherize => false), &block
  end
end

But, I don''t know why it works.  Specifically, how come I can invoke
"super" even though I am not subclassing ActiveRecord::Base, and
ActiveRecord::Base''s parent class (whom I believe is Object)
doesn''t
implement to_xml()?

Can someone who is more enlightened about Ruby/Rails help me out?

Thanks!


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