Serialized attributed with native hash is saved as !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess

[radeno]

Hi,

when i save native hash to database as serialized attribute, paper_trail it's saves as hash with indifferent access. Is there any switch to turn this behavior off?

For example:

SQL result after save my object

---\n:en: TEXT IN ENGLISH\n:de: TEXT IN DEUTSCH\n

and paper_trail version of that objet

--- !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess\n  en: TEXT IN ENGLISH\n  de: TEXT IN DEUTSCH\n

in my model i symbolize_keys with before_validation action.

serialize :attribute_translations
before_validation :normalize_translations

def normalize_translations
  self.attribute_translations = self.attribute_translations.symbolize_keys
end

[batter]

Sorry, I'm not entirely sure what the question is. Are you saying it is saving the attribute as a HashWithIndifferentAccess in you versions table? PaperTrail typically serializes data into YAML or JSON (depending on how you set it up) before inserting into the database unless you are using Postgres and have the native JSON column type available.

[NullVoxPopuli]

I noticed this the other day, too.
It seems like if a change_attribute is a native rails serialized field, it stores ruby/hash:TypeOfHash.

Maybe does teh JSON serializer serialize recursively? I wonder if it's running in to an issue where one of the nested types doesn't respond to to/as_json?

[batter]

I think this is the default behavior of YAML in rails. You can work around this by switching your default serializer to JSON. See instructions on README for how to do this.

If you have legacy data that is already serialized in the YAML format, then you can take a look at this comment on #388 for some insight as to how to convert that data to JSON format.

[batter]

Ok, did some more investigation into this. It seems this only happens in the object_changes hash, and it is because when we start composing the value from that column, we initially infer the value from model_instance.changes, as can be seen in the code here, which is returned as an ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess. So we can actually cut down on the amount of YAML being stored by the gem when YAML is the serializer by casting this value to a Hash... I'll see if I can get something merged soon that will tackle this.

[radeno]

it looks really great! thank you so much.
HashWithIndifferentAccess is a mess and i hope one time will be removed :)

Thank you again.