Marshalize

This Rails plugin provides serialization using Marshal in the same way Rails provides builtin serialization using YAML. In a model, just do

class Robot < ActiveRecord::Base
  marshalize :features
end

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

You can register 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 scripting world. For a portable yet slower alternatives, you may try JSON or YML serializers.

Example

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

Installation

as a plugin:

In your Rails application root directory:

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

as a gem:

Not yet!

No rake task needed.

TODO

• super stuff

• manage blobs, not just text field (buffer limitations)

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

License

Released under the WTFPL (sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING)