Using rails form to populate model with hash

Question

I am currently working on a simple rails4 app. As part of the app, I am creating a form to populate the database and a particular column (:additional), I would like to populate with a hash where the key is a string (heading) and the value an array of strings (paragraphs below heading). So, for example: {"Heading" => ["Paragraph1", "Paragraph2"]} etc.

I am confused how I would now set up a form using rails to populate this column. I was thinking of creating a text_field for the title and then one or more text_areas underneath for the paragraphs and then somehow merging them in the controller but when creating the fields, I have to give the object as :additional which leads to problems.

How would I go about best accomplishing this? Is it even possible or should I restructure my database somehow?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Answer 1

If you're using postgres, ActiveRecord has support for using :hstore as the column type. If you're not, you can use serialize.