Swap between STI classes in Rails

Rails allows you to swap between single table inheritance classes with the becomes method. This method creates a new instance of the desired class, and passes the attributes from the original record to the new instance.

So if I have two classes, User and Admin, where Admin inherits from User:

class User
  # ...
end

class Admin < User
  # ...
end

I can change between the two classes using becomes:

user = User.first # returns an instance of the User class
user.class # => User
user.id # => 1
user.name # => Joe Hashrocket

admin = user.becomes(Admin) # returns an instance of the Admin class
admin.class # => Admin
admin.id # => 1
admin.name # => Joe Hashrocket