Rails: Best practice to store user settings?

Question

I\'m wondering what the best way is to store user settings? For a web 2.0 app I want users to be able to select certain settings. At the moment is it only when to receive em

Answer 1

If the user settings are not meant to be findable (via a User.find_by_x_preference, e.g.) you could also store them in a serialized column as a hash. This is the use case described in the rails docs (http://www.railsbrain.com/api/rails-2.3.2/doc/index.html?a=M002334&name=serialize#), actually.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :preferences
end

u = User.new
u.preferences = {:favorite_color => "green", :favorite_book => "Moby Dick"}