From: Ghislain Mary <nospam@...>
Date: 2005-06-07T05:54:58+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie read.scan (?) question

Bruce D'Arcus a �crit :
>>Why create an Article class and an Articles class?
> 
> 
> Because I'm *real* newbie!  My only programming background is with
> XSLT.  So I'm trying to also understand basic OO design in this
> example.

So welcome into the Ruby community ;-)
I'm still considering myself as a newby too, and I don't often reply to 
posts on this list because I often think I am not able to contribute in 
a good way to the discussions. But I learn a lot by reading what is 
happening here :-)

> Can you give me an abbreviated example of how to do actually do this?
> For example, how do I define @@articles under the Article class, and
> how would I then define the append method there.

You could do something like:

class Article

   include Journals

   attr_reader :title, :author, :description, :url

   # Create the Array containing the articles.
   @@articles = Array.new

   def initialize(title, author, url)
     @title, @author, @url = title, author, url

     # Add the new Article to the articles array.
     @@articles << self
   end

   def to_s
     "#@title, #@author"
   end

   def refer
     Journals::BASE_URL + "/" + @url + "&form=refer&file=file.txt"
   end

   def pdf
     Journals::BASE_URL + "/" + @url + "&form=pdf&file=file.pdf"
   end

   # Add a class method to get an Article by its index in the @@articles 
Array.
   def self.[](index)
     @@articles[index]
   end

   # Add a method to get the number of articles.
   # Call it how you want it to be called.
   def self.count
     @@articles.size
   end

end

Good luck,

Ghislain