Now, I show you the best practices how to write an enumerable object in Ruby. The information can be useful if you want to write an object that will contain other objects. Examples: a garage for your cars; a shopping cart with groceries; a chat that contains a lot of messages, etc.
Of course, you can use Array
for the task, but if you want to add some methods for uniq behaviour, you have to write your own class.
Let's start with one simple example. We write one small garage-class for storing cars. Here is simply Struct to describe information about our cars.
Car = Struct.new(:name, :color)
And here is our class for describing garage.
class MyGarage
include Enumerable
def initialize(cars)
@cars = cars
end
def each(&block)
@cars.each(&block)
end
# some methods for uniq behaviour
end
It pretty easy to include Enumerable
-module and write each
-method to describe how to iterate our cars. Let's create an instance of MyGarage
with two cars.
garage = MyGarage.new(
[Car.new('Nissan', 'red'),
Car.new('Mazda', 'blue')]
)
Our garage
-object has all behaviour from Enumerable
-module (map/filter/reduce and others).
garage.map { |car| puts car.name }
puts garage.any? { |i| i.name == 'Nissan' }
puts garage.filter { |i| i == Car.new('Nissan', 'red') }
puts garage.count
puts garage.first
But, I don't feel satisfied with it because the instance doesn't have necessary behaviour as an instance of Array
-class. We don't have methods such as .last
, .size
or .length
. Also, we can't get an element by its index via garage[1]
.
The most obvious way is to rewrite the class and inherit it from Array
-class.
class MyGarage < Array
def initialize(arg)
super(arg)
end
end
Now, each instance of MyGarage
has the save behaviour as Enumerable
and Array
. Unfortunately, inheriting from core classes is a bad practice. Suddenly, your object will be contverted into an Array or you will find another case that hard to debug. Example:
puts garage.is_a?(MyGarage)
# true
second_garage = MyGarage.new([Car.new('Nissan', 'blue')])
puts second_garage.is_a?(MyGarage)
# true
new_garage = garage + second_garage
puts new_garage.class
# Array
How to solve the problem and what is the best practice to write your own enumerable object? It's a combination of using Enumerable
and delegating necessary methods from Array
using Forwardable
-module. The final code is here:
require 'forwardable'
Car = Struct.new(:name, :color)
class MyGarage
include Enumerable
extend Forwardable
def_delegators :@garage, :size, :length, :[], :empty?, :last, :index
def initialize(garage)
@garage = garage
end
def each(&block)
@garage.each(&block)
end
end
garage = MyGarage.new(
[Car.new('Nissan', 'red'),
Car.new('Mazda', 'blue')]
)
As a result, MyGarage
-class has all methods from Enumerable
-module and delegates required methods to Array
(size
, length
, []
, empty?
, last
and index
).
Latest comments (0)