Rails is changing attribute values from String to Fixnum in certain case

What type is the column in the database table?

If you've got an integer column, it will more than likely cast that string to an int.

It is VARCHAR(65536), so it should be a string.

What database are you using? rails will typecast the values of attributes based on what type the column has. perhaps the bug is with your adapter?

I am writing an adapter for FrontBase. It is not the adapter because the data type in this test changes even if I use MySQL.

See the MySQL test cases. Varchars are not usually turned into fixnums. It's highly unlikely that this is a bug in Rails (since it would cause a ton of applications to explode). Please verify your adapter code and reopen if you can produce this error with a test case on one of the existing adapters.

It is not my adapter code. I can add my test case to a fresh checkout of the trunk of Rails and reproduce the bug.

Add the following test to base_test.rb:

def test_attribute_type_not_changed

value = "6789" t = Topic.new("content" => value) assert value.class == t.content.class, "Attribute value class changed!"

end

And even MySQL will fail:

ruby -I "connections/native_mysql" base_test.rb

Using native MySQL Loaded suite base_test Started ....F................................................................................................................ Finished in 3.164022 seconds.

1) Failure:

test_attribute_type_not_changed(BasicsTest) [base_test.rb:1278]: Attribute value class changed!. <false> is not true.

117 tests, 297 assertions, 1 failures, 0 errors

It fails because t.content.class returns "Fixnum" instead of "String".

Formatting was off on my prior post. The test case code is:

def test_attribute_type_not_changed
  value = "6789"
  t = Topic.new("content" => value)
  assert value.class == t.content.class, "Attribute value class changed!"
end

In the test case, if "6789" is changed to "6789x" the test passes because "6789x" does not convert to a Fixnum. Changing the data type based on the content of the string seems like a bug to me.

The content attribute on Topic is marked as serializable, so this bug may be related to that.

It appears that unserialize_attribute is being called in cases when the attribute is not YAML encoded.

The correct behavior would be:

irb(main):021:0> YAML::load("--- \"1234\"\n") => "1234"

But trying to decode a string that is not YAML will give the behavior I am seeing:

irb(main):022:0> YAML::load("1234") => 1234

Loading as YAML is the default fallback. It's necessary to be compatible with multiple versions of YAML across Ruby 1.8.x.