In place editing for non-standard values

I would like to add in-place editing functionality to my application, but I fetch & store the data from/into a weird source that requires some transformations to be done before displaying & storing the content.

A slightly (over)simplified example could be the following.

Assume that I have a table "data" with two columns:

id name -- ---- 1 XX 2 XXXX 3 XXX

show.html.erb would return the following for each object:

data/1