NStore

Store gives you a thin wrapper around serialize for the purpose of storing hashes in a single column. It's like a simple key/value store baked into your record when you don't care about being able to query that store outside the context of a single record.

You can then declare accessors to this store that are then accessible just like any other attribute of the model. This is very helpful for easily exposing store keys to a form or elsewhere that's already built around just accessing attributes on the model.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'nstore'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install nstore

Usage

First include NStore module to your class/model and then describe hash-map attribute, list of accessors and couple of options.

  class User
    include NStore

    attr_accessor :meta

    nstore :meta, 
           accessors: {
             profile: {
                 :uid, :url, :avatar,
                 contact: [:email, :telegram, :twitter, :github] 
             },
             account: [:number]        
           },
           prefix: false,
           stringify: false
    ...                
  end

This will generate several setter and getter methods:

user = User.new
user.profile_uid = 100
user.profile_url
user.profile_avatar
user.profile_contact_email = 'renat@aomega.co'
user.profile_contact_telegram
user.profile_contact_twitter
user.profile_contact_github
user.account_number = 300

puts user.account_number
=> 300

List of options:

• prefix - (false by default) allows you to generate methods with the prefix of the original attribute or without

if in the example above, replace prefix with true value then nstore generates methods: user.meta_profile_uid ... user.meta_account_number

• stringify - (true by default) this option is useful for serialization of a hash-map attribute into JSON/YAML format or for saving it in a Database HSTORE/JSON/JSONB if you use symbol keys as accessors

Development

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.

Contributing

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