Question

I’m serializing many attributes on a model Page as hashes.

Because of the high number of attributes, I’ve taken a meta-programming approach and want to use .send() to iterate through a collection of attributes (such that I don’t have to type out an update action for each attribute.

I’ve done something like this:

insights.each do |ins|
  self.send("#{ins.name}=",  {(Time.now) => ins.values[1]['value'].to_f})
  self.save
end 

The problem is that this obviously overwrites the whole serialized column, whereas I wish to add this as an element to the serialized hash.

Tried something like this:

insights.each do |ins|
  self.send("#{ins.name}[#{Time.now}]=", ins.values[1]['value'].to_f)
  self.save
end 

But get a NoMethodError: undefined method page_fan_adds_unique[Mon Aug 13 13:31:58 -0400 2012]=

In the console I’m able to do Page.find(5).page_fan_adds_unique[Time.now]= 12345 and save it as an additional element to the hash as expected.

So how can I use .send() to save an additional element to a serialized hash? Or is there some other approach? Such as using update_attribute or another method? Writing my own? Any help is appreciated, even if the advice is that I shouldn’t be using serialization for this.

Answer 1

I’d do :

self.ins.name.send(:[]=, key, value)