If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have an attribute value that needs to be serialized (stored as YAML) and used within a (YAML) fixture, you can do something like:
FancyWidget:
id: 1
name: FancyWidget
serialized_hash: "<%= {:abc => {:xyz => 'foo'}}.to_yaml %>"Or, if you want to embed YAML directly you can do:
FancyWidget:
id: 1
name: FancyWidget
serialized_hash: |
---
:abc:
:xyz: fooThis is probably old hat to a lot of you, but I figured I’d doc it here since the solution felt somewhat non-obvious at first. Rails stores serialized attributes in your database this way, so you might run into this if you’re using ActiveRecord’s serialize method.