Typed serialize makes sure your serialized attribute is always the specified type. This is especially nice for serialized hashes and new models.

Example

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    typed_serialize :settings, Hash
  end

  User.new.settings        # => {}

  u = User.new
  u.settings[:theme] = 1
  u.settings               # => { :theme => 1 }

Install

As a Rails plugin:

  ./script/plugin install git://github.com/jqr/typed_serialize.git

Prefer gems? Add this to your environment.rb and run the following command.

  config.gem 'jqr-typed_serialize', :lib => 'typed_serialize', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

  $ rake gems:install