Use SQL functions for insert/update in ActiveRecord

I want to store IP addresses (v4 and v6) in my rails application. I have installed an extension to MySQL adds functions to convert ip strings to binary which will allow me to query by IP range easily.

I can use unescaped sql statements for SELECT type queries, thats easy.

The hard part is that I also need a way to overwrite the way the field is escaped for insert/update statements.

This ActiveRecord statement

new_ip = Ip.new
new_ip.start = '1.2.3.4'开发者_StackOverflow中文版
new_ip.save

Should generate the following SQL statement

INSERT INTO ips(start) VALUES(inet6_pton('1.2.3.4'));

Is there a way to do this? I tried many things, including overriding ActiveRecord::Base#arel_attributes_values, without luck : the generated sql is always converted to binary (if that matters, my column is a MySQL VARBINARY(16)).

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("INSERT INTO ips(start) VALUES(inet6_pton('1.2.3.4'))")