How to successfully inherit ActiveRecord::Base? - ruby-on-rails

Question

How to successfully inherit ActiveRecord::Base?
Environment: Ruby 2.0.0, Rails 4.0.3, Windows 8.1, PostreSQL 9.3.3, Devise 3.2.4
I have an operational app and would like to add a comprehensive logging class to it. This will be a complex class that not only logs messages but also creates an SQL database that logs transactions by object. I need this class available throughout all of the classes in the application.
To do this, I wanted to inherit ActiveRecord::Base into the class and then have all other classes inherit it, though I don't plan to use STI. That seemed to be a lot simpler in concept than in practice, even though I thought such inheritance was a common best practice. Am I missing something?
One of the initial tables was this:
class Device < ActiveRecord::Base
...
end
I set it up like this:
class XLog < ActiveRecord::Base
self.abstract_class = true
def initialize
end
end
class Device < XLog
...
end
Prior to this change, the app was working fine. After this change, when I login I receive:
ArgumentError at /devices/sign_in
wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)
The error occurs in:
bin/rails, line 4
bin/rails is:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby.exe
APP_PATH = File.expand_path('../../config/application', __FILE__)
require_relative '../config/boot'
require 'rails/commands'
Device is the Devise "User" class in this application and the error occurs when I try to login. If I change Device to inherit ActiveRecord::Base, it lets me login and run.
But, then I get another error whenever I call "new" on the other classes:
undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass
I am definitely missing something when it comes to this inheritance. Advice appreciated.

Answer 1

The initialize method was throwing the error. It was triggering every time a subclass was initialized and was configured to accept 0 parameters. When I removed it, the whole thing started working. If I need it, I'll have to configure it to accept a variable number of parameters and pass them as expected, I guess.