This is written from a bad example, but we have a model that can have many widgets, which are all saved in a JSON column. I know I just said has_many, so really we should refactor this. However, that’s a separate refactor for another time.
We were removing a specific widget, but I didn’t know how to verify where it was being used programmatically.
Turns out, you can dig through a JSON column by casting it to jsonb and using an arrow operator -> and then query a specific key using @>
As an example, if I wanted to check out my model’s column attribute for any widgets with the type: 'widget_name'.
Model.where("column::jsonb -> widgets @> ?", [{ "type" => "widget_name" }].to_json)
I original thought the column was a jsonb type. It was not, but I was able to cast it to jsonb using column::jsonb. Without casting it to jsonb this would raise operation errors: operator does not exist: json @> unknown