Serialize object and store into database

Rails
1

Hi all,

I want to serialize an object and store it into the database. This
seems a trivial task but Google gives me no useful hints.

Can someone please give me a little help on what methods I can use to
serialize and what type of column I best use to store serialized
objects.

Many thanks
Stijn

2

On 10 Apr 2008, at 16:15, Tarscher wrote:

Hi all,

I want to serialize an object and store it into the database. This
seems a trivial task but Google gives me no useful hints.

Can someone please give me a little help on what methods I can use to
serialize and what type of column I best use to store serialized
objects.

If you do
class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
serialize :bar
end

then the bar attribute will be serialized/deserialized as needed

Fred

3

Tarscher wrote:

Thanks for the answer.

I can get the serialized object out of the database but it is now in
YAML format. How can I convert this back into my vlass object?

Thanks

On Apr 10, 5:49�pm, Frederick C. [email protected]

Look at the Marshal module. From the API docs:

class Klass
  def initialize(str)
    @str = str
  end
  def sayHello
    @str
  end
end

(produces no output)

o = Klass.new("hello\n")
data = Marshal.dump(o)
obj = Marshal.load(data)
obj.sayHello   #=> "hello\n"
4

Thanks for the answer.

I can get the serialized object out of the database but it is now in
YAML format. How can I convert this back into my vlass object?

Thanks

On Apr 10, 5:49 pm, Frederick C. [email protected]

5

Rails usually does the translation for you. All you need to do is
access that attribute. If you saved it as an Array, then you should
treat the attribute like any other array. The other way is to save it
as a Hash and then you will treat it as a Hash when you access it.

On Sep 18, 8:28 am, Guy Van den berg <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-