v3 has breaking change (parameters defaults to nil)

[2called-chaos]

We upgraded from 2.0.2 to 3.0 and noticed a breaking change, that is parameters defaults to nil now. Can we revert this behavior or was this done for a reason?

Using public_activity 2.0.2
irb(main):001> PublicActivity::Activity.new.parameters
=> {}

Using public_activity 3.0.0 (was 2.0.2)
irb(main):001> PublicActivity::Activity.new.parameters
=> nil

[2called-chaos]

On further investigation this change stems from 1575d8c and the fact that Rails - when using serialize :col, Hash - used to check for the second argument to

• be literal ::JSON (and then use a Rails wrapper)
• respond to both load and dump (which Hash does not)
• fallback to use Coders::YAMLColumn (instead of just YAML)

The YAMLColumn coder guards against nil values with return object_class.new if object_class != Object && yaml.nil? (recently this has moved to Coders::ColumnSerializer in Rails)

[ur5us]

@2called-chaos I’ll release a patch release in a few days to address this issue.