Question

I have gateway_response object that represents a high level ActiveMerchant gateway response. I’d like to hang on to this object in case I need it for any issues in the future.

I’d like to store it in the DB, and have marshaled it as follows. I’ve overwritten the getter/setter methods to marshal on assignment and unmarshal on retrieval. This seems to work, but I imagine Active Record has a leaner way to do this:

  def gateway_response=(r)
   write_attribute(:gateway_response, Marshal.dump(r))
  end
  def gateway_response
    Marshal.load(read_attribute(:gateway_response))
  end

Answer 1

Use the serialize method.

class Order
  # add a text column called gateway_response in the `orders` table.
  serialize :gateway_response
end

Now:

order.gateway_response = r
order.save
order.gateway_response # response object