activerecord-postgres-array: A Ruby repository from gotwalt

Postgres array support for activerecord

Add basic support for postgres arrays to activerecord, with special attention to getting rails migrations / schema dumps working nicely.

Installation

gem install activerecord-postgres-array

or if you use bundler

gem 'activerecord-postgres-array'

Usage

In your migrations you can define postgres array fields such as:

create_table :people do |t|
  ...
  t.string_array :real_energy
  t.decimal_array :real_energy, :precision => 18, :scale => 6
  ...
end

When queried, the postgres arrays will be returned as ruby arrays, and vice versa.

Compatibility with activerecord-postgres-hstore

activerecord-postgres-hstore and activerecord-postgres-array both monkeypatch ActiveRecord::Base#arel_attributes_values, which leads to problems if these gems are used together. This gem is aware of activerecord-postgres-hstore and incorporates it in the monkeypatch. However, it is important that activerecord-postgres-array is loaded after activerecord-postgres-hstore for this to work.

Current limitations

Parsing of multi-dimensional postgres array strings is currently not implemented.
String, Decimal and Integer arrays have been tested, but other array types have not been. Type casting will need to be implemented for booleans, dates, etc

Future enhancements