Marshalize¶ ↑

This Rails plugin provides serialization using Marshal[http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Marshal.html] in the same way Rails provides builtin serialization using YAML. In a model, just do

class YourModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  marshalize :attribute
end

and your app will automagically handle the attribute using the binary converter Marshal: dumping when saving to the database, loading when fetching from it.

You can store any kind object (not just arrays and hashes…). Be aware that Marshal defines a binary format which may change in incoming Ruby releases and is currently not portable outside the Ruby world. For portable yet slower alternatives, you may try JSON or XML serializers.

$ script/generate scaffold Robot name:string parameters:text features:text status:text

class Robot < ActiveRecord::Base

  marshalize :parameters               # The "parameters" attribute will be saved as binary data

  marshalize :features,  RobotFeature  # You can define what kind of object is to be marshalized
                                       # An error will be raised if another class is provided for
                                       # this attribute

  serialize  :status,    Array         # Marshalization plays well with YAML classic serialization

end

In your environment.rb, inside the Rails::Initializer, add the following line:

config.gem "chikamichi-marshalize", :lib => 'marshalize', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

Then run rake gems:install to fetch the plugin in.

In your Rails application root directory:

script/plugin install git://github.com/chikamichi/marshalize.git

If necessary:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

Then:

sudo gem install chikamichi-marshalize

A very simple test case is provided as test/marshalize_test.rb. Run rake test.

• make base64 encoding optionnal for binary attributes (blob), mandatory for text attributes

• some super stuff to avoid harsh overriding of ActiveRecord internals

• a method to fetch raw binary and/or encoded data from the db, bypassing unmarshalizing?

• rake tasks to manage marshalized data recovering in case Marshal went astray (say, a new version breaking things down?)

Released under the WTFPL (see COPYING).