I’m currently working on a social media platform for London, with it’s main purpose being to promote a wellbeing lifestyle in a hectic city. I wrote this handy little utility module for creating methods from serialized data.

Say, for example you have an object, but it can have serialized data stored within a hash in the database, instead of getting the data through the hash notation, you can now access it directly as Object.first.hash_key_name instead of Object.first.hash[:hash_key_name]

module ExtraFields
  def self.included(base)

    base.serialized_fields.each do |method_name|
      base.class_eval <<-EOS
        def #{method_name.to_s}
          extra_fields[:#{method_name}] if extra_fields && extra_fields[:#{method_name}]
        end
        def #{method_name.to_s}=(value)
          self.extra_fields[:#{method_name}] = value
        end
      EOS
    end

  end
end

This is handy in two ways, you can access serialized data directly as methods of the class instance. Plus you can use the serialized fields directly in a form, as the module automatically creates the setters for the hashes keys. Pretty handy, you just have to specify in an array of serialized field symbols as a private method in the parent class.

class Page
  include ExtraFields

  private

    def serialized_fields
      [:field_one, :field_two, :another_field]
    end

end