Question

Is there a better way to save some string as an attachment via Paperlip as making a tmp file, putting the string into it, opening it again and saving it as an attachment ?

Like this :

  def save_string data
    tmp_file = "/some/path"
    File.open(tmp_file,'w') do |f|
      f.write(data)
    end

    File.open(tmp_file,'r') do |f|
      ceneo_xml = f
      save!
    end
  end

Answer 1

Paperclip stores files alongside your models — this is what it has been written to do, so I think the short answer is “no”.

If you look in attachment.rb in the Paperclip source you’ll see a method called def assign uploaded_file. If you look at the implementation of this method you can see that it expects the uploaded file object to have a certain methods defined on it.

You could create your own class which followed the same interface as Paperclip expects, but to be honest your solution of saving a file and assigning that to Paperclip is probably the easiest approach.