Pass Virtus/Attribute classes to Rails' ActiveRecord serialize (as json)

01_json_serializer.rb

# lib/json_serializer.rb
class JsonSerializer
  # Dumps objects to json.
  # Loads json into specified class.
  #
  # e.g:
  #
  # class User
  #   serialize :data, JsonSerializer.new(DataObject)
  # end
  #
  # Will serialize any instance of DataObject into a json string.
  # Will unserialize any json string into an DataObject instance.
  # Params:
  # +klass+:: Class that parsed attributes will be initialized into
  def initialize(klass)
    @klass = klass
  end

  def dump(object)
    object.as_json
  end

  def load(hash)
    if hash.is_a? String
      hash = JSON.parse(hash)
    end

    @klass.new(hash)
  end
end

02_data_object.rb

# app/models/data_object.rb
class DataObject
  include Virtus.model
  
  attribute :moves, String
  attribute :like, String
  attribute :jagger, String
end

03_user.rb

# app/models/user.rb
require './lib/json_serializer'

class User
  serialize :data, JsonSerializer.new(DataObject)
end

If you have a json/jsonb data column, you might expect the following to dump your DataObject instance as_json to the database.

serialize :data, DataObject

But this will actually serialize your DataObject through YAML, see.

--- !ruby/object:DataObject\n...

Not sure if this is something that Rails should check for: by default, if it's a json/jsonb column, when dumping call the method as_json, when loading initialize the json into the provided class, instead of using YAML.