Rails - Jun 2006 - storing attribute legal values in model and/or database

I have a rails application which has a table ''cells'' which
contains some
80 or
so attribute fields (related to the electrical characteristics of macros 
that
are hooked together, instantiated in silicon and become microchips).

I want to also store the legal values for many of those attribute fields 
in
another database table. The problem is that
1) the sub-set of attributes that apply to each cell is dependent on the 
values
   of certain key cell attributes
   (eg. if the value of the library attribute is ''xx00'', then
certain
attribute
   fields will not apply)

and

2) the legal values of many of the attributes will vary depending on the 
value
   of other attributes
   (eg. if the value of the ''cell_type'' attribute is
''blah'' then the
legal values
    for attribute ''foo'' are [abc, def, ghi], otherwise they
are [abc,
ghi].

I get the whole notion of single inheritance tables which I will need to 
use here;
what I don''t get is how I can model these dependencies in the database.

Can anyone share a similar need they had and how they handled it.

Thanks,
Peter

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