Question

I’ve got a serialized array

class Enviroment < ActiveRecord::Base
serialize :roles, Array

...
t.column :roles, :string, :default=> Array.new

and I would like do things like

Enviroment.find(1).roles.push 'thing'

Answer 1

Providing such default value will save it’s YAML representation as String into the Database and Rails unserializes that back into string. That’s why it is not working.

Also, maybe you’d want to use text as the column type, so that your array won’t be truncated when it gets longer. In recent Rails syntax, that would be:

t.text :roles

And when you want to store new role into database, you’d have to save the object afterwards (in contrast to has_many association which is automatically saved b/c it’s key is in the other table):

e = Environment.find(1)
e.roles.push 'thing'
e.save

Or if it absolutely needs to be oneliner:

Environment.find(1).tap{|e| e.roles.push 'things'}.save