SerializedVirtualAttributes

This gem provides ability to have several attributes in one ActiveRecord serialized column. It might be useful for STI classes, that have some different attributes and you don't want to have separate columns for each class.

This gem requires ActiveRecord 3.0 or higher and ruby 1.9 or higher.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'serialized_virtual_attributes'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install serialized_virtual_attributes

Just create text column, serialize it to Hash and define your virtual attributes using serialized_virtual_attribute:

  class Server < ActiveRecord::Base
    serialize :configuration, Hash

    # basic attributes
    serialized_virtual_attribute :host, :description, to: :configuration

    # attribute with typecast
    serialized_virtual_attribute :port, to: :configuration, typecast: Integer

    # attributes with prefixed accessors
    serialized_virtual_attribute :name, to: :configuration, prefix: :network
  end

Then you are able to use accessors:

  serv = Server.new
  serv.host = 'localhost'
  serv.port = 9232
  serv.network_name = 'oxygen'

For ActiveRecord < 4 attr_accessible is enabled by default. You can disable it by providing accessible: false.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/flant/serialized_virtual_attributes.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.