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@example.com")
=> #<Email:0x007f99cd77e110 @value="email@example.com">
u.save
(0.2ms)  begin transaction
SQL (0.7ms)  INSERT INTO "users" ("email", "created_at", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?, ?)  [["email", "email@example.com"], ["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@example.com">...>
u.email.class
=> Email

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

u.email == Email.new('email@example.com')
=> true
u.email > Email.new('a@example.com')
=> true

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

u.email.value
=> "email@example.com"
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