According to the Rails 5 documentation an empty Array should be serialized to NULL:
Empty objects as {}, in the case of Hash, or [], in the case of Array, will always be persisted as null.
Maybe I got it wrong but my empty Array is always serialized as --- [] (YAML) or [] (JSON) in the database. Beside that, the serialization works fine and as expected.
I am asking because we are currently running Rails 4 but we may want to switch to Rails 5. But then the behavior would change from [] to NULL (since the sentence above is missing in Rails 4 documentation). Therefore I thought of writing my own serializer for Rails 4 that also uses NULL instead of [], but it looks like as if this is not necessay.
For completeness:
class TestModel < ActiveRecord::Base
serialize :test_attribute, JSON #doesn't matter if it's JSON, Hash or YAML
end
TestModel.create(test_attribute: [])
Any ideas?
