Resque-Serializable

This gem adds support for serializing and deserializing Resque job arguments. Although not considered the "pure" way by some philosophers, sometimes passing complex objects to a background processor (Resque in this case), rather than just simple objects (String, Integer, Hash etc.) does make our lives a bit easier.

Resque-Serializable depends on Resque 1.9

Enter Resque-Serializable...

Suppose you want run a lengthy background process using Resque and wish to pass on to your background worker an instance of some class you have in your code. Without Resque-Serializable you'd probably save your instance state somehow and pass on that state as a list of arguments.

With Resque-Serializable, you would do something like that:

c = SomeClass.new
c.some_attr = 'Some Value'
Resque.enqueue(LongBackgroundJob,'some random string',[1,2,3,4], :serialize => [c])

Your background job process method will look something like that:

class LongBackgroundJob
  @queue = :my_queue
  
  def self.process(str, arr, c)
    puts str #output 'some random string'
    puts arr.inspect #output [1,2,3,4]
    puts c.some_attr #output 'Some Value'
  end
end

To serialize an argument using Resque-Serializable, you simply pass the Resque.enqueue method an argument :serialze => []. The value of the :serialize should be an array of objects that should be serialized before queuing and deserialized before processing

Words of caution

Serializing and deserializing is done via YAML. Please make sure you only pass objects that respond to to_yaml method to the :serialize array

Argument order is kept between the enqueue and process methods, however the serializable objects inside our :serialize array will be passed on to the process method without their containing :serialize hash. Here's an example to clarify:

# Enqueue a job
# Note :serialize receives an array of 3 objects for serializing
Resque.enqueue(LongBackgroundJob,:serialize => [a,b,c], Time.now.to_i)

# Process the job
class LongBackgroundJob
  @queue = :my_queue
  
  # Note that the unserialized objects are passed in the order they appear
  # inside the :serialize argument in the enqueue method above
  def self.process(a, b, c, timestamp)
  end
end