Loading & Dumping of data in AR with Marshal

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hey,

I'm writing an application that stores models attributes in a single column called `data`, using Marshal. My ultimate goal is to allow any/all records to be saved in one database table. I'm wondering if there's a better way to do this, and also if I should Base64 encode the result of Marshal.dump as mentioned here: How to save Ruby object as a blob in MySQL - Ruby - Ruby-Forum

Here's my current code:

# Post(id: integer, data: text, type: string, created_at: datetime, updated_at: datetime) class Content < ActiveRecord::Base    private      def unmarshal        Marshal.load(self.data)      end end

class Post < Content    before_save :marshal

   def title      unmarshal[:title]    end

   def title=(value)      @title = value    end

   private      def marshal        self.data = Marshal.dump({ :title => self.title })      end end

Thanks for any tips/help!

2

This design is well on it's way to ending up on TheDailyWTF. Several things:

- using Marshal is a bad, bad, bad idea. The format is fragile when class definitions are changed and not guaranteed to be readable across Ruby versions. It's also completely incomprehensible to anything besides Ruby.

- you're re-implementing the idea of serialized fields (check the ActiveRecord docs) using Marshal instead of YAML.

- you're trying to jam all the data into one table. This is almost certainly wrong.

If your data set is REALLY as unstructured as you're implying, you may want to look at some of the schemaless document DB stuff (CouchDB and friends).

--Matt Jones