Serializable ActiveRecord columns with JSON

[txus]

Hi! I'd like to include a JSON Column encoder to use with ActiveRecord::Base serialize. Now it only supports YAML.

What I don't quite like is that, since serialize already has a last argument with a default, the options hash isn't so comfortable to use. In my pull request to serialize a column with JSON you must do this:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :data, Hash, :format => :json
end

You can't omit the Hash part if you want to specify a :format, and I don't like that. How would you improve this?

[oriolgual]

You may want to check this article about custom serializers: http://edgerails.info/articles/what-s-new-in-edge-rails/2011/03/09/custom-activerecord-attribute-serialization/index.html

[miloops]

Why do we need to this instead just doing: rescue ActiveSupport::JSON.backend::ParseError ?

[txus]

It's just mimics the implementation of the YAML serializer, but I think you are right, there's no need for this abstraction.

[NZKoz]

You can either change the signature to use *args and args.extract_options! to support an optional hash argument. Or you'll have to do something where you check something like if class_name.is_a? Hash.

For now I'd prefer we split the pull request in two, apply a JSONColumn (with @miloops' suggested improvements) and then think about some syntactic sugar for the serialize method if needs be

[benatkin]

@oriolgual I tried to find an open issue or a pull request that covers the idea of adding Coders::JSONColumn to go along with Coders::YAMLColumn but didn't find one.