Hello all,

I have an immutable class Foo (once a foo object is created its state
is fixed).  Foo objects have a bunch of attributes so their yaml
strings are fairly long.

There is a small set of standard, frequently used foo objects and I
have defined these as  constants right in the class (newed and set
each attribute for Foo::FOO1, Foo::FOO2, ... etc.).

When I YAML one of these standard foos to the database and back, it
seems inefficient to create and send a big long yaml string describing
each attribute and then on retrieval to create a whole new Foo object
when all I really want is to look up an already-made constant.

Is there a good solution to making the yaml-ing of constants efficient?

Thanks!

--Brian Buckley

foo = Foo:FOO1
data = foo.to_yaml  # the yaml string here is unnecessarily long
foo = YAML::load(data)  # and now after retrieval we have an
additional foo object when we really only need the one original
constant




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