attr_accessor meta programming

Reading Jamis Buck's article Writing Domain Specific Languages I decided to attempt his challenge to write my own attr_accessor function.

First, I was curious to see how attr_accessor was implemented in Ruby. I found the source in object.c which simply calls "rb_attr(klass, rb_to_id(argv[i]), 1, 1, Qtrue);". The "rb_attr" function is located in eval.c. If you spend a few min looking at it, you will see it has special code for handling Access Control (public, private, protected). For now, I will ignore Access Control, and just implement creating the accessor methods.

Where should attr_accessor go? Looking at the docs, you will find attr_accessor is a member of Module. To see if I had the correct location, I quickly wrote...

module Module
  alias old_attr_accessor attr_accessor
  
  def attr_accessor( *symbols )
    puts "attr_accessor called with #{symbols.join(' ')}."
    old_attr_accessor( *symbols )
  end
end

This failed since Module is not a module, it is a class! Laughing at myself and Ruby, I corrected the definition. The code above also demonstrates how easy you can implement simple Aspect Oriented Programming in Ruby. Using alias, I give the old attr_accessor method an new name old_attr_accessor. Then overwrite attr_accessor with my own code. Any call to attr_accessor will now print out the information that it was called.

Fun so far, but I haven't really defined my own version of attr_accessor. I've simple called the old one. I found module_eval does the trick (class_eval also works since it is a synonym for Module.module_eval). The final code is...

class Module
  def attr_accessor( *symbols )
    symbols.each { | symbol |
      module_eval( "def #{symbol}() @#{symbol}; end" )
      module_eval( "def #{symbol}=(val) @#{symbol} = val; end" )
    }
  end
end

class Foobar 
  attr_accessor :foo
  private
    attr_accessor :bar
end

fb = Foobar.new
fb.foo = "hello"
fb.bar = "world"
puts fb.foo  # >> hello
puts fb.bar  # >> world

Pretty simple. Unfortunately, this demonstrates the problem where my attr_accessor doesn't know about the Access Control. Looking at the Ruby library and source, I could not find any way to query the Access Control level from within my attr_accessor. So the only solution I could find is the following hack...

class Module
  alias old_public public
  alias old_private private
  alias old_protected protected
  
  def public( aSymbol = nil )
    if aSymbol.nil? 
      @__module_access_level = 'public' 
      old_public
    else
      old_public( aSymbol )
    end
  end
  
  def private( aSymbol = nil )
    if aSymbol.nil? 
      @__module_access_level = 'private' 
      old_private
    else
      old_private( aSymbol )
    end
  end

  def protected( aSymbol = nil )
    if aSymbol.nil? 
      @__module_access_level = 'protected' 
      old_private
    else
      old_private( aSymbol )
    end
  end

  def attr_accessor( *symbols )
    symbols.each { | symbol |
      module_eval( "def #{symbol}() @#{symbol}; end" )
      module_eval( "def #{symbol}=(val) @#{symbol} = val; end" )
      module_eval( "#{@__module_access_level} :#{symbol}; #{@__module_access_level} :#{symbol}=" )
    }
  end
  
  @__module_access_level = 'public'
end

class Foobar 
  attr_accessor :foo
  private
    attr_accessor :bar
end

fb = Foobar.new
fb.foo = "hello"
fb.bar = "world" #>> private method `bar=' called for #<Foobar:0x2855710 @foo="hello"> (NoMethodError)
puts fb.foo  #
puts fb.bar  # 

Anyone got a better idea for handling Access Control?

Rubyham

It has been over a month since my last post. I have been playing around with Ruby Rails in the little spare time I can find. Sometime I might post more of my experiences with it.

In breaking news, Birmingham is getting a Ruby users group named Rubyham. Kicked off by Josh Adams, Kevin Russell and Myself. It will be fun!

Playing with Rails, I used the Act As Authenticated plugin. The plugin seems to work fine. When adding the User Activation feature, I found a few changes were needed to make me happy. I have posted them back to the User Activation page. Here is the revision with my changes at the bottom.