I want to save data like this:
User.create(name:"Guy", properties:{url:["url1","url2","url3"], street_address:"asdf"})
Can I do so in Rails 4? So far, I have tried migration:
add_column :users, :properties, :hstore, array: true
But when I save the array in hstore, it returns error:
PG::InvalidTextRepresentation: ERROR: array value must start with "{" or dimension information
hstore
is intended for simple key/value storage, where both the keys and values are simple unstructured strings. From the fine manual:
F.16. hstore
This module implements the
store
data type for storing sets of key/value pairs within a single PostgreSQL value. [...] Keys and values are simply text strings.
Note the last sentence: keys and values in hstore
are strings. That means that you can't put an array in an hstore
value without some handholding to convert the array to and from a string and you really don't want to be messing around with that sort of thing.
However, there is a JSON data type available:
8.14. JSON Type
The
json
data type can be used to store JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data, as specified in RFC 4627.
and JSON can easily handle embedded arrays and objects. Try using JSON instead:
add_column :users, :properties, :json
You'll have to remove the old hstore
column first though.
Also, you didn't want array: true
on your hstore
column as you weren't storing an array of hstore
s, you just wanted one of them.