Nested Hstore

Store nested hashes and other types in ActiveRecord hstores

Overview

Postgres hstores offer a number of benefits, but they don't natively support multi-level data. Nested Hstore adds this support to ActiveRecord, letting you treat an hstore like a NoSQL-like document.

Hstore functions are still supported at the root level.

It also lets you store data types other than hashes in an hstore. All of the following values will be returned verbatim:

# Nested hash
post.my_hstore = {
  'title' => 'My Post',
  'comment_ids' => [34, 67, 82],
  'user' => {
    'id' => 15,
    'username' => 'janedoe'
  }
}

# Array
post.my_hstore = [34, 67, 82]

# Array of nested hashes
post.my_hstore = [
  {
    'id' => 15,
    'username' => 'janedoe'
  },
  {
    'id' => 16,
    'username' => 'johndoe'
  }
]

# Integer
post.my_hstore = 43

# Float
post.my_hstore = 43.1

# String
post.my_hstore = 'janedoe'

Installation

Include it in your Gemfile:

gem 'nested-hstore'

Set up activerecord-postgres-hstore if you haven't already. Instead of using ActiveRecord::Coders::Hstore, use:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :my_store, ActiveRecord::Coders::NestedHstore
end

License

Nested Hstore is released under the MIT License. Please see the MIT-LICENSE file for details.