search for: disabled_at

Hey all, i''m rather new to rails and was curious if ActiveRecord implemented anything like is_active where the delete functions would just mark records as inactive, vs deleting rows. (similar to created_at, etc). I need a history of transactions, and this is how I would code in other languages. Any advice? Is there are smarter way to implement this? Thanks in advance! -- Posted via

...d I want my administrators to be able to disable authors. I don''t want to delete authors because this would cause data integrity issues (orphaned Author foreign key in the Post model). So my plan is to re- task the destroy method of the AuthorsContoller to allow an administrator to set a disabled_at timestamp on an Author instead of actually deleting him. What are the disadvantages to this design? One of the advantages to this design that I see is that I don''t have to declare a new controller method in my routes...it just fits into the REST design as is, no? Thanks for any advice.