ActiveRecord helper for serialized hashes

Posted on September 19, 2012

ActiveRecord’s serialize functionality is quite useful when you want some schema-less data within a relational database. I have found this particularly useful for two cases:

  • Design elements on a page
  • Authentication data for various (unknown) external services

However, the one thing that is missing from the built in functionality is the nice getter/setters that ActiveRecord provides. Let’s face it, hash syntax can be pretty annoying.

Here’s a helper I created to automagically generate attribute methods for keys in a serialized hash. There’s also a bit of functionality to interpret the data as markdown and return HTML. Enjoy!

Visit the Gist here.


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