ActiveRecord storing arrays and hashes

Rails
1

Hi,

When trying to store a Array or Hash to a string field, ActiveRecord
automatically
serializes them to yaml. If that’s so why is there a special option
called serialize?

–
Azhagu Selvan

http://tamizhgeek.in

2

On Friday, August 24, 2012 11:46:35 AM UTC+1, Azhaguselvan SP wrote:

Hi,

When trying to store a Array or Hash to a string field, ActiveRecord
automatically
serializes them to yaml. If that’s so why is there a special option
called serialize?

The automatic serialization is just a side effect that everything has to
be forced into a string before active record will have it. Because
Active
Record doesn’t know that the column is a serialzied one, when you try
and
retrieve the value you’ll just get the raw yaml string. Using serialise
tells Active Record to unserialize when reading.

Fred

3

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Frederick C.
[email protected] wrote:

The automatic serialization is just a side effect that everything has to be
forced into a string before active record will have it. Because Active
Record doesn’t know that the column is a serialzied one, when you try and
retrieve the value you’ll just get the raw yaml string. Using serialise
tells Active Record to unserialize when reading.

Oops yeah. I was checking this within a rails console without reloading
it.
After reloading, the attribute just returns a yaml string.

Thanks for the clarification!

–
Azhagu Selvan

http://tamizhgeek.in

4

On Friday, 24 August 2012 06:12:02 UTC-5, Azhaguselvan SP wrote:

Oops yeah. I was checking this within a rails console without reloading
it.
After reloading, the attribute just returns a yaml string.

It also exists so we can build custom serializers, for example I have
several fields like role which are symbolized and string-ified using a
serializer and a custom serializer to store an array of tags as a NULL
hstore hash.