Storing an object in the db

Rails
1

I’ve asked this before, but never got a working response. I’d like to
store an object inside a binary field in my db. So I’d have a class
like this

class MyAwesomeClass
def do_something_awesome
…
end
end

then

class MyRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
end

the table my_record would have a binary field, my_object, that would
store an object of MyAwesomeClass. So I could do:
r = MyRecord.new
r.my_object = MyAwesomeClass.new
r.reload
r.my_object.do_something_awesome

I saw that there’s a serialize helper, where I’d put this in my AR
class:
class MyRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
serialize :my_object
end

But that doesn’t seem to be working, it just says my_object is a
string, and none of the MyAwesomeClass methods are available to it.
I’d really appreciate any help with this.

Pat

2

You could try using a text field instead and storing the object in YAML
format.

To convert an object to YAML, do an_object.to_yaml.

To restore the object, do an_object = YAML::load(a_model.object)

Jen

3

serialized data is going to be stored here

class Serializedobj < ActiveRecord::Base
# this table has just two fields: id, data (type TEXT)
end

this class is going to be serialized

class C
attr_accessor :a, :b
def initialize( a, b )
@a, @b = a, b
end
def to_str
a.to_s + ’ ’ + b.to_s
end
end

	obj= C.new('hi', 'there')  # create something to be serialized
	so = Serializedobj.new     # create a place to store objects
	so.data = Marshal.dump obj # serialize obj
	so.save                    # save serialized data in db
	id = so.id                 # save id so we can restore obj later
	so = nil
	obj= nil

	so = Serializedobj.find_by_id( id ) # try to find serialized obj
	unless so
		raise Exception, 'serialization failed'
	end

	obj = Marshal.load so.data # reconstitute obj
	puts obj.to_str            # i'm alive!