Writer uses inspect to serialize object

[ressu]

Inspect is meant to provide a human readable output of an object. It's not always guaranteed that it can be read in to a new object. For example Date objects fail to be imported again.

Consider the following:

['2001-01-01'.to_date].inspect
=> "[Mon, 01 Jan 2001]"

[garysweaver]

The quick and dirty way to fix this is (and you might not need first two lines):

# Depending on what has been predefined, these may need to be required.
require 'date' unless defined?(DateTime)
require 'time' unless Time.respond_to?(:iso8601)

class ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
  def inspect
    "DateTime.iso8601(#{iso8601.inspect})"
  end
end if defined?(ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone) 

class DateTime
  def inspect
    "DateTime.iso8601(#{iso8601.inspect})"
  end
end

class Date
  def inspect
    "Date.iso8601(#{iso8601.inspect})"
  end
end

class Time
  def inspect
    "Time.iso8601(#{iso8601.inspect})"
  end
end

If you put this into a rake task at the root of the task code, it may leak into use of the annotations gem, etc. which rely on normal inspect behavior for Date/Time/DateTime. One way to handle this problem is to only patch them when you have a rake task that would (typically) only run from command-line, and eval the patch in the method body, being sure to use fully-defined module/class refs, just in case, e.g.

namespace :db do
  namespace :seed do
    task :some_task ... do |task, args|
      # patch inspects
      eval <<-EOS
      class ::ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
        def inspect
          "DateTime.iso8601(\#{iso8601.inspect})"
        end
      end

      class ::DateTime
        def inspect
          "DateTime.iso8601(\#{iso8601.inspect})"
        end
      end

      class ::Date
        def inspect
          "Date.iso8601(\#{iso8601.inspect})"
        end
      end

      class ::Time
        def inspect
          "Time.iso8601(\#{iso8601.inspect})"
        end
      end
EOS

      # ... and use SeedFu::Writer.write somewhere under that
    end
  end
end

That wouldn't completely stop the patch from getting in the way, but it would limit havoc.

I also attempted a patch to seed-fu in #63 that doesn't require overriding inspect, because I doubt people want seed-fu changing inspect behavior on Date/Time/DateTime/ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone.

[johnpray]

👍 to this. Without either @garysweaver's monkeypatch or #63, seed-fu's Writer is useless for times and dates.

For now I'm using the second monkeypatch @garysweaver posted above (limiting its effects to a single rake task). Thanks for that!