Hidden Gems: ActiveRecord Store

Rails is a large framework with a lot of handy built-in tools for specific situations. In this series, we'll take a look at some of the lesser-known tools hidden in Rails' large codebase.In this article, we'll focus on ActiveRecord's store and store_accessor methods. Both of these methods are aimed at the use case of storing structured data in a database column, such as JSON or YAML. While store_accessor gives us a handy way to grab values from these data without clogging up a model with getter methods, store goes a step further and transparently serializes/deserializes data to our chosen format. To understand where this can be useful, we'll also take a look at options for storing JSON in relational databases and some of the reasons you may want to do so.