[ruby-talk:15749] Re: Ruby Programming Practice

> But in a general Ruby programming view, where one programmer
> is controlling all the files, is it good practice for a superclass to
> use a method (or instance variable) defined by a derived class?
> This does not seem to follow from the library designer view.

Hi John,

This is a fairly common practice when taking advantage of polymorphism.
Here are two common examples, one with an instance variable and
one with a method.

Example 1
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class FileNode
  def initialize(parentFolder)
    @parentFolder
  end

  def getParentFolder
    return @parentFolder
  end
end

class FolderNode < FileNode
...
end
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Example 2
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# let's say we're implementing a library to plug projects into an app server
# and we want to make a lot of project classes but use DRY principle
# and not repeat basic scaffolding code
class RequestHandlerBaseClass  < RequestHandlerForThirdPartyAppServer
  def initialize
     @knowledgeRetrievalSystem = KnowledgeRetrievalSystem.new # common to
all projects
  end

  def hasPermissions(session)  #varies by project
    # this is a placeholder for an abstract/virtual method
  end

  def handleRequest(session, request, outputStream)
    if hasPermissions(session) then
      return @knowledgeRetrievalSystem.retrieve(request)
    else
      return "Insufficient permissions for request."
    end
  end

end

class DentalProject < RequestHandlerBaseClass
  ...
  def hasPermissions(session)
    return session.getVariable("eligibleForBenefits")
  end
  ...
end

class ManagerInfoProject < RequestHandlerBaseClass
  ...
  def hasPermissions(session)
    return session.getVariable("isManager")
  end
  ...
end


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