rails: how to not include some db attributes in model

Question

Hi,

My DB table has a column that can contain a very big amount of data. I do not want this data to be part of the corresponding rails object (model).

How do I tell in the model that I do not want to store this field in memory ?

Initially this comes from the fact that I have a session bigger than 4k and rails raises a ActionController::Session::CookieStore::CookieOverflow exception.

Thanks for your help, Mickael.

Answer 1

When loading your model you could explicitly set the columns you want to select and skip large columns:

MyModel.find(id, :select => 'column1, column2, column3')

Answer 2

You'd have to specify the columns explicitly via the find-option :select. However, storing models in the session is discouraged. How about storing just the object-id in the session, and holding the Model-Object itself in Rails.cache?

Greets

Seb