Issue of using field of type array in rails

Question

There might be a group of records in a table where only two fields vary record by record, and rest fields remains same. This calls for a normalization by splitting by a table through a foreign key association. But, in Ruby-on-Rails, it would mean the creation of a model. So, is it still possible to lessen use of disk space?

May be, it is, because it would be reasonable that storing multiple values of one column in a record would require the column to be an array of any type. But declaring the field to be :array type results in an error. So, is there a way to work around it?

RAM · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-22 09:20:02Z

1

After generating a model, open the model's file. Insert one line for each field.

serialize :field_name

But ensure that the fields for which you are serializing, should be of type

:text

or

:string

If they aren't of such primitive data types, i.e. of another type like

:datetime

then it would return an error.

This step is not complete as a whole. You need to do one complementing step: de-serialize, because in the model-level storage, it is stored as a string starting with "---\n-", which is not suitable for array-type operations.

While reading data from the model, you need to perform the following step:

YAML.load(field_name)

where field_name refers to the field that was serialized.

The above step would return an array, on which you can perform normal array operations.

answered Oct 22, 2012 at 9:20

RAM

2,4191 gold badge24 silver badges33 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Issue of using field of type array in rails

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related