RoR as_json call missing data that's in the database - json

Question

using rails 4.1.8, ruby 2.2, mysql, elasticsearch-rails 5.0.4, elasticsearch 5.2. the selectors field on the Selector model is stored as json in a varchar column and for some reason when I load a location and its associated selector using as_json, the selectors field comes back nil when I know there is data in the column?
the Selector table:
create table Selectors do
t.text selectors
t.text selectors_other
t.references location
t.timestamps
end
I recently added Elastic Search so the model has:
settings index: {
analysis: {
analyzer: {
selector_analyzer: {
type: :standard,
stopwords: ["some","words","here"]
}
}
}
}
mapping do
indexes :selectors, {analyzer: :selector_analyzer}
indexes :selectors_other, {analyzer: :selector_analyzer}
end
def as_indexed_json(options={})
{
'id' => id,
'selectors' => selectors,
'selectors_other' => selectors_other
}
end
and the call I make to get the data for the view is
Location.find(<id>).as_json(:include => [:selector, :response])
every field I expect is in the json and all the data is there except the selectors field which is nil. I know there is data because if I do:
loc = Location.find(<id>)
loc.selector
the selectors field is not nil. I tried adding an as_json method to the Selector model but it didn't have any effect. The only changes I've made recently were to add the Selector model to the Elasticsearch index. I used an IndexManager in order to create one index with multiple types and created a rake task for deployments and re-indexing. The only distinction is that this field is stored as json, but it was working fine before.
Any ideas, suggestions, etc would be appreciated since I can't think of anything that would cause it to be nil.

Answer 1

figured out what was causing the field to be nil, tho not why it is causing a problem
I had added a method to manipulate the json when updating the selectors field, in that method I had a line like
sel_hash = JSON.parse(self.selectors)
the IDE was unable to resolve self.selectors so I added
attr_accessor :selectors
and that line for some reason caused the selectors field to be nil, go figure