ClassyAttribute

Give your ActiveRecord attribute some class.

ClassyAttribute provies a simple way to wrap ActiveRecord attributes with feature rich ___domain objects. It works with String, Numeric, Date and any other Ruby type that can be natively represented in your database.

Warning: Consider this code experimental until v1.0.0 is released.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'classy_attribute'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install classy_attribute

Usage

Use ClassyAttribute in conjunction with ActiveRecord#serialize.

In your model class:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :email, Email
end

Then, in your attribute class:

class Email
  include ClassyAttribute
end

Voilà, your attribute is now classy:

u = User.new
=> #<User:0x007f99cd755b98 id: nil, email: nil>
u.email = Email.new("[email protected]")
=> #<Email:0x007f99cd77e110 @value="[email protected]">
u.save
(0.2ms)  begin transaction
SQL (0.7ms)  INSERT INTO "users" ("email", "created_at", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?, ?)  [["email", "[email protected]"], ["created_at", "2015-01-15 04:05:21.939200"], ["updated_at", "2015-01-15 04:05:21.939200"]]
(0.5ms)  commit transaction
=> true  
u.reload
=> #<User:0x007f99cd755b98 id: 1, email: #<Email:0x007f99d2c55c38 @value="[email protected]">...>
u.email.class
=> Email

You can compare instances of your attribute class as you'd expect:

u.email == Email.new('[email protected]')
=> true
u.email > Email.new('[email protected]')
=> true

Access the storage representation by calling #value on an instance of your attribute class:

u.email.value
=> "[email protected]"
u.email.value.class
=> String

Go forth and add useful behavior to your attribute class!

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/johndbritton/classy_attribute/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request