Abstract ActiveRecord Classes by Convention

Ruby on Rails provides a very simple mechanism for specifying that a model class is an abstract base class and therefore has no corresponding database table:

class MyAbstractClass &lt ActiveRecord::Base**self.abstract_class = true**...end

Code can then interrogate a model class to see if it is abstract:

puts "it's abstract" if MyAbstractClass.abstract_class?

Not so hard, however I pretty much always prefix the name of my abstract classes with, you guessed it, 'Abstract'. So, I added some code to the RedHill on Rails Core Plugin the other day to extend the definition of an abstract class to include the name:

def abstract_class?@@abstract_class || !(name =~ /^Abstract/).nil?end

With that simple change, I no longer need to explicitly set self.abstract_class = true; it just works by magicconvention.

I suppose I could/should have created a plugin for it but I was feeling lazy :)