Using infinite floats in Ruby on Rails

7
votes

In a Rails application using SQLite3 I'd like to use the float values Float::INFINITY and -Float::INFINITY in a model with a floating point attribute. Running INSERT queries using Model.create! this seems to work fine, since activerecord uses prepared statements in this case. However, when I try to update a record using foo.save, activerecord doesn't use a prepared stament and just puts the string Infinity right in the query, resulting in

SQLite3::SQLException: no such column: Infinity

Is there a way to work around this or do I need to resort to using strings in model/database?

Rails version 3.2.21, SQLite3 version 1.3.10

Edit. For now I changed the column type to string in the database migration and use

serialize :property, Float

to tell activerecord to store YAML-serialized floats in the database, allowing to store Float::INFINITY just fine.

1
ruby-on-railsrubyactiverecordsqlite

1 Answers

2
votes

It's because Float::INFINITY in rails is defined as 1.0/0, that sqlite3 doesn't know what to do with it. You can use a very big number to define infinity like 9e999 as a replacement to the value you'll be saving to the database