Saver

This gem lets you easily add text columns to your mongo mapper (only for now) models. We use this gem to save logging information for one of our web apps. In the future if the associations break, you'll still have a text version of the data saved.

Clearly I'm not advocating ever deleting data, but we wanted to use this feature so if something happens later on, we'd still have string versions of the data.

Here is a simple class of a log item:

class LogItem
  include Saver
  save_attributes :account, card
end

If you want to use something other than to_s to generate the string you can pass the method to use to the singular version of save_attribute:

class LogItem
  include Saver
  save_attribute :account
  save_attribute :card, :method => :card_data
end

Now when we save our model we get data like this:

LogItem {
  :account_id => 1,
  :account_saver => 'Christopher Giroir',
  :card_id => 2,
  :card_saver => 'Card 45 with $50.00 on it'
}