Question

I’m using Ruby 1.8.6 and have a class (not an ActiveRecord class) that I want to cache using memcache-client, which serializes it with Marshal.dump before storing it in the cache. However, it has an instance variable (which does refer to an ActiveRecord class) that I don’t want to serialize, as I don’t want multiple objects running around corresponding to the same database row. Instead, I want to set the attribute to refer to the appropriate object (which I already have a reference to) after the serialized object is loaded from the cache and reconstructed.

What’s the easiest way to prevent only one attribute from being marshalled?

(I’m aware of this question, but the given answer appears to apply only to ActiveRecord classes.)

Answer 1

from http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Marshal.html

When dumping an object the method marshal_dump will be called.
marshal_dump must return a result containing the information necessary
for marshal_load to reconstitute the object. The result can be any
object.

When loading an object dumped using marshal_dump the object is first
allocated then marshal_load is called with the result from
marshal_dump. marshal_load must recreate the object from the
information in the result.

so the question you are linking to also applies to you. just override those two methods and you should be fine.