Question

In Rails application I want to be able to store schema-less objects — JSON data structure, that could have different structure from object to object, or for the same object at different times.

With ElasticSearch I can do this. However I would like to be use some kind of ORM with Rails for this.

Tried to do some testing with Tire tutorial, doing this in Rails console:

>>> c = Article.new :title =>'New article', :content => { :a => 'a', :b => 'b'}

I can see that content data stored as serialized YAML:

>> Article.last.content
=> "---\n:a: a\n:b: b\n"

This will require parsing search result to JSON, which is not a problem. But main question: will I be able to search inside serialized data? Is there a way to return attribute names from arbitrary structured data (like Object.keys)?

If not Tire, is there other solutions to do this?

Answer 1

Not really sure what you’re up to here, but Tire does come with a drop-in replacement for ActiveRecord integration, just include Tire::Model::Persistence in your class. You may also define properties (with mappings, type casting, default values, etc):

class Article

  include Tire::Model::Persistence

  property :title
  property :published_on, type: 'date'
  property :tags,         analyzer: 'keyword', default: []

end

The Tire README and integration tests have all the info.

Of course you’re able to search inside the content attribute — it’s just a matter of proper mapping.

If you’re after some specific behaviour, please update your question…