Rails - best practice to store key/value hash

Question

Here's my challenge. I have a key/value set that I want to tie to a model. These are my specific requirements:

I want the hash to be stored as a serialized JSON object in the model's table instead of in a separate table
I want to be able to pre-define the valid keys within the model itself
I want to be able to set a strong type for each key and automatically perform validations. I don't want to have to write validation functions for each individual attribute unless it needs a validation out of the basic data type scope.
I would LOVE to be able to magically access the attributes inside a form generator (f.input :my_key) and have the form generator recognize that :my_key is of type :boolean and create a checkbox instead of a generic text input. The same for other data types.

There are a few different ways to solve this problem, and lots of opinions for both. I read over this answer from 5 years ago:

It seems that many/most of those plugins have been abandoned. Anything else come out in the last 5 years that matches my criteria?

Arkhitech · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-18 20:52:31Z

1

Your question is a bit open-ended, but as far as I can see your needs, they should be met with using Hashie gem.

answered Apr 18, 2014 at 20:52

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1 Comment

It, indeed, was open ended. Hashie looks promising for this use case. Thanks for the tip!