Rails validation scope of serialized text array - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a Rails model that has a field array_field, which is a serialized text array. I want the combination of this array value and the value of another_field to be unique.
Should be straightforward, no?
class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
validates_uniqueness_of :array_field, scope: [:another_field]
serialize :filters, Array
end
This doesn't work. However, if I switch them around in the validations,
validates_uniqueness_of :another_field, scope: [:array_field] works as expected.
Can someone explain why this is the case? Is this expected behavior?
The Postgres error for the former setup when array_field's value is nil or [] is this:
PG::SyntaxError: ERROR: syntax error at or near ")"
LINE 1: ...other_field" = 103 AND "foo"."array_field" = ) LIMIT 1
When array_field is [[1, 2], [3, 4, 5]] (a sample multiarray I was using), it's:
PG::UndefinedFunction: ERROR: operator does not exist: text = integer
LINE 1: ...other_field" = 103 AND "foo"."array_field" = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) LIMIT 1
It seems that Rails doesn't know how to translate the serialized object for this query. Am I missing something or is this a bug?
Edit: This is occurring in Rails 4.0.2.
Second Edit:
Clarification: I understand why this is happening (Rails has custom logic for list queries), and I'm using both a custom validator to manually perform the serialization before validating and a custom serializer to avoid problems with comparisons of Yaml strings (as detailed in my other question here).
At this point I'm mostly just wondering why validates_uniqueness_of treats the primary field differently from the scope fields, and am hoping someone can shed some light.

Answer 1

I can't explain why the validations work one way around, but not the other.
But I think basically your problems are due to the fact that serialize only defines that an attribute is to be serialized using Yaml on save and deserialized upon load.
In other words: the only thing you say by doing serialize :filters, Array is that
when saving a Foo, serialize it's filters attribute using Yaml first,
when loading a Foo from the DB, make sure that the value of the
filters attribute is an Array after deserialization, otherwise raise an exception
It does not affect how queries are constructed. Instead, Rails' usual rules for queries are used. So an array is converted into a comma separated list of numbers. This makes sense for example when constructing a LIKE query. This is the reason why the query fails. The DB field is a string but you're trying to compare it to a list.
I haven't used native PostgreSQL array columns with Rails 4, but my guess is that these issues would solved if you used those instead a serialization-type solution. You get the added benefit of being able to search within the contents of arrays on the DB level.