Jay Fields' Thoughts

I was recently working with a framework that reopened and defined a method on Object. I wanted the behavior of the framework, but I also wanted to define my own behavior. This is generally the case for alias_method_chain or one of the other Alternatives for Redefining Methods, but my circumstances (to be discussed in a subsequent post) prevented me from using one of the better known solutions.

The solution that worked for me was to move the original method definition to a module.

class Speaker
  def say_hello
    "hello"
  end
end

module EnglishSpeaker
  expects_method = Speaker.instance_method(:say_hello)
  define_method :say_hello do |*args|
    expects_method.bind(self).call(*args)
  end
end

class Speaker
  undef say_hello
end

Speaker.new.say_hello # => -:18: undefined method `say_hello' for #<Speaker:0x285b4> (NoMethodError)
Speaker.new.extend(EnglishSpeaker).say_hello # => "hello"

You may never need this technique, I only needed it once in the past 2.5 years. But, when it applied I found it to be significantly better than the alternatives.

Labels: define_method, module, ruby