On My Projects Becoming Obsolete
December 27, 2011 § 1 Comment
Rails 3.2 RC1 was released last week and it announces some pretty cool new things. One of those things is something that I have played with building out myself (tagged logging) and another is something I actually did (ActiveRecord Store). When I wrote my data-attributes gem, I was inspired to do so because I had a users table that had an ever-growing number of email permission checks. I never queried against these, and they made doing a SELCET * FROM users; really painful to try and read. I decided to just throw them all in a serialized column and be done with it.
When I first read the release notes for 3.2 I had two thoughts go through my head.
1) Well, crap. data-attributes is now dead and useless. (yes, I use <code> tags in my head)
2) Awesome, the solution I came up with for a problem I was having is the same one that the Rails team came up with. Maybe I might know a thing or two about what I am doing.
But as I started to compare the new ActiveRecord::Store with data-attributes, I began to realize that my little project isn’t dead quite yet. The accessors generated by the store call with AR::S aren’t full attribute accessors. By this I mean they don’t go through read_attribute and write_attribute before committing the new data to the serialized hash. This prevents you from intercepting the accessor call and doing some pre/post processing. You also don’t get default values as with other attribute accessors. Definitely not a huge deal in the least, but something to be aware of. AR::S does mark things as dirty though. data-attributes does not do this as of yet.
As for the future for of data-attributes, I think that it is actually dead in the long run. If I were to work on this problem more in the future, I’d probably do so by adding the AR::S instead of continuing working on data-attributes.
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[…] 3.2 has been released and there are a few things in it that I am excited about. I mentioned in a previous post that a few of the things coming in 3.2 were things that I had thought about doing or had already […]