Codify

Transparently encodes text before saving to your database. Automatically encodes any desired text attributes for saving to database, and decodes when retrieving the field. Includes encoding for compression, encryption and error checking.

Many encodings can be useful, for example, compression can be useful for large text fields, to save disk space, encryption may be used to safeguard data.

This is not suitable if you plan to do fulltext searching directly on encoded attributes, although it can still be used where a separate fulltext search engine is used.

Currently, only activerecord is supported.

Installation

Add this line to your application''s Gemfile:

gem 'codify'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install codify

Usage

In general, to encode an attribute, just call attr_encoder on the attribute:

class DataBlock < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_encoder :data, :encoder => :base64
end

Codify will now expect to save data to an encoded_data field. So you should add the column via a migration. Notice that we can now to save binary data to the database, and can use a text type, because of the Base64Encoder.

add_column :data_blocks, :encoded_data, :text

Now, you can easily read or write, and leave the encoding and decoding to Codify.

# writing
datablock = DataBlock.create(:data => "Data, could be binary, like these: \0\x43!")

# reading
datablock = DataBlock.first
datablock.data # => "Data, could be binary, ..."

A convenience method attr_compressor is also available to compress an attribute.

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_compressor :body #, :encoder => :zlib # this is already the default for attr_compressor
end

Options

Options can be passed to some encoders. The exact options possible depend on the encoder. Probably the easiest way is just to pass them to attr_encoder when an encoded attribute is declared.

attr_compressor :body, :encoder => :zlib, :level => 9 # highest possible compression

They can also be passed when initializing an encoder object:

attr_compressor :body, :encoder => Codify::Encoders::ZlibEncoder.new(:level => 9)

Chaining Encoders

A number of encoders can be chained, to apply them one after the other for a single attribute.

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_compressor :body, :encoder => [:zlib, :base64]
end

This will first compress with ZlibEncoder, then encode the resulting binary with Base64Encoder.

Custom Encoders

If the included encoders are not sufficient, you can use your own, just inherit from Codify::Encoders::AbstractEncoder, and define encode and decode methods. To use options which may be passed to the encoder, just call options with a symbol.

class MyEncoder < Codify::Encoders::AbstractEncoder
  def encode(data)
    "#{options(:header)}#{data}#{options(:footer)}" # wrap data in header and footer
  end
  def decode(data)
    data[options(:header).length...options(:footer).length] # remove header and footer from data
  end
end
class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_encoder :data, :encoder => MyEncoder
end

Instead of passing a class to attr_encoder, it is also possible to register custom encoders with a symbol.

Codify::Encoders.register :my_encoder, MyEncoder, :encoding
class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_encoder :data, :encoder => :my_encoder, :encoder_type => :encoding
end

The :encoder_type option specifies a registration namespace which will be searched first for :my_encoder. The global registration namespace will only be searched after a specific namespace does not include the desired encoder. This can be useful if multiple encoders are given the same name. If they are in different namespaces, the can still be specified.

An encoder may also be registered by passing a block to register. This can be used to dynamically register a set of symbols.

Codify::Encoders.register MyEncoder do |symbol|
  return MyEncoder if [:myencoder, :my_encoder, :MYENCODER].include?(symbol)
  nil # if symbol is not found, return nil
end

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request