How to edit a Rails serialized field in a form?

Question

I have a data model in my Rails project that has a serialized field:

class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :options
end

The opti

Answer 1

emh is almost there. I would think that Rails would return the values to the form fields but it does not. So you can just put it in there manually in the ":value =>" parameter for each field. It doesn't look slick, but it works.

Here it is from top to bottom:

class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
    serialize :options, Hash
end

<%= form_for :widget, @widget, :url => {:action => "update"}, :html => {:method => :put} do |f| %>
<%= f.error_messages %>
    <%= f.fields_for :options do |o| %>
        <%= o.text_field :axis_x, :size => 10, :value => @widget.options["axis_x"] %>
        <%= o.text_field :axis_y, :size => 10, :value => @widget.options["axis_y"] %>
    <% end %>
<% end %>

Any field you add in the "fields_for" will show up in the serialized hash. You can add or remove fields at will. They will be passed as attributes to the "options" hash and stored as YAML.