Entity architecture in Rails

Question

I am in doubt about how it would be the best way to represent an entity named client that may have sub-layers of the same entity.

Customer may own another Customer who is actually a carrier, and that Transposer may own another Customer who is a broker.

I thought about creating extended classes Cliente < Transportador < Corretor, since they all have basically the same attributes.

I’ve done a lot of this in Java but a rubista friend once told me he hated this kind of practice.

Below follows the structure and class diagram I thought of creating.

Answer 1

After studying the guide http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html I solved the problem used the self Join. Now I was able to map the Clients of a broker and the Brokers of an Insurance Company.