Hi all.  I'm looking for suggestions of how other people have
implemented a situation like the following.  I'd like to create a base
activerecord model, let's call it Widget, from which other classes are
based.  I'd like to store the name of the final class in the database
and either use that information to load the proper class or to include
a module that overrides certain methods of the base class.  For
example:

Widget < AR: Base
RSSWidget < Widget
HTMLWidget < Widget

w = Widget.first

Currently w is a generic widget; it doesn't know if it's really a
RSSWidget or an HTMLWidget.  Really, what I'm more interest in is if
something, say Page, has many widgets, then I can iterate through all
widgets for an instance of page and each will cast itself to the
appropriate subclass (or include the proper module).

Is there an AR hook that I can use immediately after the model is
loaded from the database to include the necessary module and either
deserialize any additional information or load additional properties
from other tables?  I've read that AR has an abstract_class property,
but it almost looks like it sees this problem from the other
direction, with the tables belonging to the inherited classes, but
maybe I've misunderstood it.

Any suggestions of how this may be done would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Jeff
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