Jay Fields' Thoughts

In April I wrote about assigning instance variables in a constructor. The code I provided with that entry supports initializing your classes positionally or with a hash.

Since then, I've been thinking that a nice alternative might be a constructor that takes one argument without a name, but any additional arguments must be named (via a hash). Yes, I basically stole this concept from Smalltalk.

class Person
  initialize_with :employee_id, :first_name, :last_name
  attr_reader :employee_id, :first_name, :last_name
end

class Money
  initialize_with :amount
  attr_reader :amount
end

Below is a solution to making the above code execute as expected.

class Module
  def initialize_with(*args)
    first_arg = args.shift
    define_method :initialize do |*arg|
      instance_variable_set "@#{first_arg}", arg.shift
      required_args = args.inject(first_arg.to_s) { |result, attribute| result << ", #{attribute}" }
      raise ArgumentError.new("initialize requires #{required_args}") if args.any? && arg.empty?
      args.each do |attribute|
        raise ArgumentError.new("initialize requires #{required_args}") unless arg.first.has_key?(attribute)
        instance_variable_set "@#{attribute}", arg.first[attribute]
      end
    end
  end
end

One other small change that you might notice is that I've made all the arguments required. That's a preference that I might blog about later, but I think it should be easy enough to remove the raises if you want your options arguments to be optional.

For those interested, here's the code with tests.

class Module
  def initialize_with(*args)
    first_arg = args.shift
    define_method :initialize do |*arg|
      instance_variable_set "@#{first_arg}", arg.shift
      required_args = args.inject(first_arg.to_s) { |result, attribute| result << ", #{attribute}" }
      raise ArgumentError.new("initialize requires #{required_args}") if args.any? && arg.empty?
      args.each do |attribute|
        raise ArgumentError.new("initialize requires #{required_args}") unless arg.first.has_key?(attribute)
        instance_variable_set "@#{attribute}", arg.first[attribute]
      end
    end
  end
end

require 'test/unit'
require 'rubygems'
require 'dust'

class Person
  initialize_with :employee_id, :first_name, :last_name
  attr_reader :employee_id, :first_name, :last_name
end

class Money
  initialize_with :amount
  attr_reader :amount
end

unit_tests do
  test "verify Person requires all options" do
    assert_raises ArgumentError do
      Person.new(2, :first_name => 'mike')
    end
  end

  test "verify Person requires first arg" do
    assert_raises ArgumentError do
      Person.new(:first_name => 'mike', :last_name => 'ward')
    end
  end

  test "verify Person employee_id" do
    mike = Person.new(2, :first_name => 'mike', :last_name => 'ward')
    assert_equal 2, mike.employee_id
  end
  
  test "verify Person first_name" do
    mike = Person.new(2, :first_name => 'mike', :last_name => 'ward')
    assert_equal 'mike', mike.first_name
  end

  test "verify Person last_name" do
    mike = Person.new(2, :first_name => 'mike', :last_name => 'ward')
    assert_equal 'ward', mike.last_name
  end
  
  test "verify Money amount" do
    money = Money.new(10)
    assert_equal 10, money.amount
  end
end

Labels: initialize_with, initializer, ruby