I am using Ruby’s YAML library to dump objects to yaml document. The built in library dumps all fields, but in my program I only need to serialize part of them. So I need a way to set some fields to be transient.

I searched the web, and found Xavier’s yaml_helper. It can solve my problem, but not exactly what I want. It uses class attribute “persistent” to indicating the fields to be serialized. In my suitation, there are many fields in the object, and only two or three are transient. So I prefer the “transient” class attribute.

After reading the source code of yaml_helper and Ruby’s YAML library, I decided to write my own. Now, you can check it from here. It is no more than 100 lines code with most copied from yaml_helper, and realy a tiny tiny extension.