Question

I want to make a simple user notification in rails with just text. I want there to be multiple notifications obviously so my question is do I have to create a whole new migration and create an association with my User model or is there some way to just extend a “notifications” text attribute in my User table? I guess you can just insert line breaks in between notifications but that’s not what I’m looking for as that sounds like it would get too messy. Thanks!

Answer 1

If you just want to store notifications only you can tell Rails to treat it as an Array (notifications’ column type should be text):

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :notifications, Array
end

If you want to store any additional notification details (like author or timestamps or whatever) you should probably go for a separate model.

Rails docs: Active Record, search for “Saving arrays, hashes, and other non-mappable objects in text columns”.