I'm working on a problem where I need to store serialized hierarchies of Ruby objects in the database. Many of the objects that will need to be saved are ActiveRecord objects with a lot of attributes. Instead of saving the entire objects and then refreshing their attributes from the DB when I load them (in case they changed, which is likely), it would be easier to just store the references (class and database id) for these objects.

Does anyone know if there's already a way to do this in Rails, or if there's an existing gem for it? Wanted to check if something existed before spending a ton of time hacking on it.