Is there a way to persist a Hash in ActiveRecord?

Rails
1

I can’t seem to figure out a way to persist a hash attribute in
ActiveRecord. Let’s say I have a Game, which has a many-to-many with
players.

Each player has an index, but the array can have empty spaces in it
(since a game might not be filled up yet).

I’d like to model this using a hash, with position --> player mapping.

(What I don’t want to do is create a “nil” player).

In Hibernate, you would do this with … is there an ActiveRecord
equivalent?

Thanks,
Dave

2

On 3/26/06, David T. [email protected] wrote:

(What I don’t want to do is create a “nil” player).

In Hibernate, you would do this with … is there an ActiveRecord
equivalent?

Thanks,
Dave

It should ‘just work’, by converting the Hash to YAML, if you assign
it to an attribute that maps to a varchar/CLOB column.
If that doesn’t work because I’m crazy and misremembering something,
you could do it ‘manually’ by calling to_yaml on your Hash as part of
the before_save callback.

I remember that there’s a case statement somewhere in the ActiveRecord
code that decides what to do with an attribute based on its Ruby
type… and the “else” branch converts it to YAML.