Rails - Aug 2006 - Help with best-practice for Rails Model

Hello!

So, I''m fairly new to Rails and I have a question that pertains to how 
to best model something that is typically addressed via inheritance. 
Here''s the situation:

I need to maintain an EventLog
There are several different "types" (eight at this point) of Events
All Events have a couple of attributes in common (user_id, event_at, 
note, summary, type, etc.)
Each Event has several (2-10) attributes that are unique based on
"type"
summary needs to be overridden for each type, but accessible when do a 
find on the superclass.
I need to expose all the functionality in an API.
The API will be used from non-Rails apps.


I would like to SIMPLY and EFFICIENTLY retrieve Events by:

ALWAYS by user_id
of any type for a given day
of a given type for a given day
of a given type for a range of days

QUESTIONS:

Should I model this using single-table inheritance?

with something like:

 create_table "log_events", :force => true do |t|
    t.column "user_id", :integer
    t.column "event_at", :datetime
    t.column "note", :text
    t.column "type", :string
    t.column "type1_attr", :integer
    t.column "type2_attr", :integer
  end

   class LogEvent < ActiveRecord::Base
   class SubType1Event < LogEvent
   class SubType2Event < LogEvent

If not, then how? (keeping it simple!)

Since event_at is a datetime, how do I best do a find by only the Date 
portion?
For a Date Range?

Should I use REST or SOAP for the API?
Is one or the other better if I want to pass complex objects back and 
forth?

Thanks in advance for helping me with this!  I apologize about the 
"Nuby" nature of these questions in advance...

Martin






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