serialize ... what am I doing wrong?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi. I want to serialize out an object to the database. But I am getting an integer value in the column when I expect to see some yaml!

migration: class CreateSummaries < ActiveRecord::Migration   def self.up     create_table :summaries do |t|        t.text :summary_data       t.timestamps     end   end end

class: class Summary < ActiveRecord::Base   serialize :summary_data end

example: summary = Summary.new(:summary_data => User.first) => #<Summary id: nil, fss_player_id: nil, stats_type: nil, scope: nil, summary_data: #<User id: 4, login: "LoginName", email: "xx@xx.xx", crypted_password: "cbc8411974ad085f608b6e0a05dd608e7577de19", salt: "ddc4528beea65095b7f5619912a6ca0681d0c10e", created_at: "2008-09-12 18:43:19", updated_at: "2009-02-05 04:20:58", remember_token: nil, remember_token_expires_at: nil, pw_reset_code: nil, role: "commissioner", sign_up_code: "44e11a23be5b7833bf73d479a05166c0e0377c56", reset_password_code_until: nil, permalink: "fname", name: "FName", street: nil, city: nil, province: nil, postcode: nil, country: nil, home_phone: nil, mobile_phone: nil, display_name: "FName", display_teams: true, website: nil, occupation: nil, interests: nil, favourite_teams: nil, anonymous_contact: false>, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>

summary.save!

=> true

Summary.first.summary_data

=> 4

What am I doing wrong?

2

Summary.new is expecting to receive a hash, which isn't what you're giving it.

i.e.: summary = Summary.new( :summary_data => { "name"=>"Administator", "login"=>"admin" } )

summary.save!

Summary.last.summary_data => {"name"=>"Administrator", "login"=>"admin"}

3

Oh! I thought the point was that I could save any object... are you saying I can only save hash's?

4

Try this out (assuming you've got a User with id == 1):

summary = Summary.new(:summary_data => User.find(1).attributes).save!

Go here: ActiveRecord::Base and search for serialize

5

I picked on the hash since that was your example - what appeared to be a User record. Yes, you can save anything you want, it's only yaml after all...

So the :summary_data from your example maps on to a series of name<>value tuples. Other languages refer to this as marshalling, I seem to recall that Ruby has some functions with marshall in their name.

Rails likes to talk about serializing and attribute lists, ActiveRecord provides the attributes method as an easy way to serialize the record's fields.