Question

I have the following model in my Rails app that uses serialization with JSON codec. My database columns are of the type ‘text’

class Sample < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :face_detect, JSON
end

When I run the following in the rails console

Sample.first.read_attribute_before_type_cast('face_detect').class

I’m expecting a ‘String’ class, since I expect ‘before_type_cast’, also means before serialisation, but instead I get the ‘Hash’ class. How is this possible?

(using rvm, with ruby-1.9.2-p290 with rails (3.1.3) and postgresql on Mac OSX)

Answer 1

Serialization happens very deeply inside Arel, but I could access the pre-serialized value like this:

@sample.instance_variable_get("@attributes")["face_detect"].serialized_value