Rails - Mar 2005 - inheritance of activerecord

Ok, so, I have an rss feed class derived from activerecord:

class Feed < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :feed_items

  #.... lots of stuff here for caching and the like .....
end

This all works great.  But I also want to play with del.icio.us and
Flickr''s rss feeds.  Ideally, I''d like to have classes like:

class FeedItem < ActiveRecord::Base
  #.... blah blah ....
end
class FlickrFeedItem < FeedItem
  def image
    #.... blah blah ....
  end
  def thumbnail
    #.... blah blah ....
  end
  def tags
    #.... blah blah ....
  end
end
class DeliciousFeedItem < FeedItem
  def tags
    #.... blah blah ....
  end
end

Or some suchlike thing.

Is there any way I can make this class

class FlickrFeed < Feed
end

return feed_items of type FlickrFeedItem?

Am I stuck with:

class FlickrFeed < Feed
  has_many :flickr_feed_items, :foreign_key => "feed_id"
end

?
-- 
Bob Aman

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:29:50 -0800, D Andrew Reynhout
<reynhout-Yp+tNMrX9ANBDgjK7y7TUQ@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> It sounds like you need Class Table Inheritance.  There''s a patch
> (RESEARCH) by johnwilger-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org to
implement CLSTI, which I am
> using for a similar need.
> 
> http://dev.rubyonrails.com/ticket/600
> 
> Andrew
Well, no.  See, the inherited classes need to be using the *exact
same* table.  The extra methods are using the same table field,
they''re just doing some extra processing on top of what already
exists.

This works I think:

class FlickrFeed < Feed
 has_many :feed_items, :class_name => "FlickrFeedItem",
:foreign_key
=> "feed_id"
end

It looks like it overwrites the feed_items from the parent with the
version I wanted.  Is there anything really wrong with this approach?

-- 
Bob Aman