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Serializing custom Ruby classes with YAML

January 2nd, 2008 at 6:32 pm (Ruby)

I needed to be able to save an array of POROs (plain old Ruby objects) to the database on a Rails project that I’m currently working on. That should be easy, right?

This ought to do the job, yes?:
class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
serialize attribute_name
end


However, this didn’t quite work as advertised, the objects being returned were typed as YAML::Object instead of the actual class being serialized. Turns out that YAML is unable to find the reference to the actual class and so its falling back to using YAML::Object as the generic class type for deserialised objects. The answer to this: Rails ticket #7537.

Take a look at the YAML documentation for all the gory details.