Question:

Is there any built in support in Yii for typed models? For instance, If I have a class called Flashlight, Lock, and Folder that all extend my Product active Record model and I want to make sure it the typed class rather than the generic via Yii relations, how would I do that?

Currently I am overwriting __call and I'm not really happy about it. I feel like this is probably a common need.

this is called <a href="http://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/198/single-table-inheritance/" rel="nofollow">single table inheritance</a>.

Basically you overwrite the <a href="http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CActiveRecord#instantiate-detail" rel="nofollow">instantiate</a> method of the model to return the class you need:

// protected/models/Product.php protected function instantiate($attributes){ switch($attributes['type']){ case 'flashlight': $class='Flashlight'; break; case 'lock': $class='Lock'; break; case 'folder': $class='Folder'; break; default: $class=get_class($this); } $model=new $class(null); return $model; }