Question

I built my own comments in my rails app without threading and I want to be able to send reply all notifications for new comments on a project. Would it be best to just store emails into a ruby hash in MySQL and then read from it when necessary? I’m trying to figure out how to insert emails into a hash with keys I don’t have to define, any help?

Answer 1

Assuming you have some column with string type in some mysql table.

Use json gem. If you don’t have json gem install it by gem install json.

require 'json'
reply_emails_list = ["[e-mail]", "[e-mail]"]
obj.column_name = {:emails => reply_emails_list}.to_json  #storing ruby hash as string in mysql

To get ruby hash back use `JSON.parse(obj)’

emails_list = JSON.parse(obj.column_name)  #ruby hash

or

In rails way. In model you can do like this:

YourModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :column_name, Array  #If don't want hash
  serialize :column_name     #you can store key value pair as I shown above
end

Using second will avoid converting from hash to json and vice versa