Just wondering if anyone can shed some light on the basics of getter setters in Ruby on Rails with a view on strongly typed. I am very new to ruby on rails and predominately have a good understanding of .NET.
For example, let's consider we have a .net class called Person
class Person
{
public string Firstname{get;set;}
public string Lastname{get;set;}
public Address HomeAddress{get;set;}
}
class Address
{
public string AddressLine1{get;set;}
public string City{get;set;}
public string Country{get;set;}
}
In Ruby, I would write this as
class Person
attr_accessor :FirstName
attr_accessor :LastName
attr_accessor :HomeAddress
end
class Address
attr_accessor :AddressLine1
attr_accessor :City
attr_accessor :Country
end
Looking at the Ruby version of the Person class how do I specify the types for the accessor methods FirstName, LastName and HomeAddress? If I were to consume this class I could feed any type into HomeAddress but I want this accessor method to accept only the TYPE Address.
Any suggestions ?
thanks
TL;DR: No it's not possible ... and long answer, yes it is possible, read the metaprogramming section :)
Ruby is a dynamic language, that's why you won't get compile time type warnings/errors as you get in languages like C#.
Same as you can't specify a type for a variable, you can't specify a type for attr_accessor.
This might sound stupid to you coming from .NET, but in the Ruby community, people kind of expect you to write tests. If you do so, these types of problems will basically vanish. In Ruby on Rails, you should test your models. If you do so, you won't really have any trouble with accidentaly assigning something somewhere wrong.
If you're talking about ActiveRecord in Ruby on Rails specifically, assigning a String into an attribute which is defined as an Integer in the database will result in exception being thrown.
By the way, according to convention, you shouldn't use CamelCase for attributes, so the correct class definition should be
class Person
attr_accessor :first_name
attr_accessor :last_name
attr_accessor :home_address
end
class Address
attr_accessor :address_line1
attr_accessor :city
attr_accessor :country
end
One reason for this is that if you Capitalize the first letter, Ruby will define a constant instead of a variable.
number = 1 # regular variable
Pi = 3.14159 # constant ... changing will result in a warning, not an error
Metaprogramming hacks
By the way, Ruby also has insanely huge metaprogramming capabilities. You could write your own attr_accessor with a type check, that could be used something like
typesafe_accessor :price, Integer
with definition something like
class Foo
# 'static', or better said 'class' method ...
def self.typesafe_accessor(name, type)
# here we dynamically define accessor methods
define_method(name) do
# unfortunately you have to add the @ here, so string interpolation comes to help
instance_variable_get("@#{name}")
end
define_method("#{name}=") do |value|
# simply check a type and raise an exception if it's not what we want
# since this type of Ruby block is a closure, we don't have to store the
# 'type' variable, it will 'remember' it's value
if value.is_a? type
instance_variable_set("@#{name}", value)
else
raise ArgumentError.new("Invalid Type")
end
end
end
# Yes we're actually calling a method here, because class definitions
# aren't different from a 'running' code. The only difference is that
# the code inside a class definition is executed in the context of the class object,
# which means if we were to call 'self' here, it would return Foo
typesafe_accessor :foo, Integer
end
f = Foo.new
f.foo = 1
f.foo = "bar" # KaboOoOoOoM an exception thrown here!
or at least something along these lines :) This code works! Ruby allows you to define methods on the fly, which is how attr_accessor works.
Also blocks are almost always closures, which means I can do the if value.is_a? type without passing it as a parameter.
It's too complicated to explain here when this is true and when it's not. In short, there are different types of blocks
Proc, which is created by Proc.newlambda, which is created by the keyword lambda
one of the differences is that calling return in a lambda will only return from the lambda itself, but when you do the same thing from a Proc, the whole method around the block will return, which is used when iterating, e.g.
def find(array, something)
array.each do |item|
# return will return from the whole 'find()' function
# we're also comparing 'item' to 'something', because the block passed
# to the each method is also a closure
return item if item == something
end
return nil # not necessary, but makes it more readable for explanation purposes
end
If you're into this kind of stuff, I recommend you check out PragProg Ruby Metaprogramming screencast.
