Unlimited arbitrary properties (key/value pairs) for an ActiveRecord model

Question

Using ruby on rails, I have a Customer table that I want to be able to add unlimited properties (key value pairs) to. I'm not sure what the key/value pairs will be yet so I'm not sure how to do this. For example, one customer could be:

• Customer 1 properties:
  • color: 'yellow'
  • brand: 'nike'
  • sales: '33'
• Customer 2 properties:
  • color: 'red'
  • phone_number: '1111111111'
  • purchases: '2'

Basically, customers can have any number of properties in a key/value pair.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You should be able to use serialize for this, and assign your properties hash to your properties attribute, and retrieve them in the same way.