From: "Ara.T.Howard" <Ara.T.Howard@...>
Date: 2005-10-29T01:28:06+09:00
Subject: Re: "Reflecting" on my self.n00b

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, swille wrote:

> I'm admittedly quite a novice with programming.  I'm sort of playing around
> with some ideas, and I'm wondering if what I'm doing is completely stupid,
> and if not, is there a better way to do it?  Also, is there any way that I
> could do some type of type-ish validation on the data?
>
> Basically, I want to provide what I suppose would be abstract class (?),
> which someone else could extend and add attributes if they'd like.  I'd like
> to be able to look into the class and pick out the attributes to populate
> (which is the reason for all of the sp_set & sp_get stuff).  Basically, my
> thought is to be able to provide a web interface at some point to populate
> the needed data of a class, and then maybe Marshal.dump the object to a
> database and call it later using that data as config data essentially.  I'm
> sure I could learn a ton about this from reading Rails code, but there's so
> much of it that I don't know where to look.  Output and code follows.
> Please feel free to tell me if this is dumb :O)

i think what you want is traits:

   harp:~ > cat a.rb
   require 'traits'
   require 'readline'

   class ServiceProfile
     trait 'url', 'type' => String, 'case' => %r|^http://|
     trait 'username', 'type' => String
     trait 'password', 'type' => String
     trait 'certificate', 'munge' => 'to_i', 'case' => Fixnum
     trait 'owner', 'type' => String

     def inspect
       "#{ self.class }( " << klass.reader_traits.map{|t| "#{ t }:#{ send(t).inspect}" }.join(', ') << " )"
     end
     def input io
       klass::writer_traits.each{|t| send t, Readline::readline("#{ t } ")}
     end
     def klass
       self.class
     end
   end

   class MyService < ServiceProfile
     trait 'extra', 'munge' => 'to_f', 'ducktypes' => %w( floor ceil )
   end

   my_service = MyService::new
   p my_service

   my_service.input STDIN
   p my_service


   harp:~ > ruby a.rb
   MyService( extra:nil, certificate:nil, owner:nil, password:nil, url:nil, username:nil )
   extra= 42.0
   certificate= 42abcd
   owner= me
   password= tru5t
   url= http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/traits/
   username= ahoward
   MyService( extra:42.0, certificate:42, owner:"me", password:"tru5t", url:"http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/traits/", username:"ahoward" )

regards.


-a
-- 
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| email :: ara [dot] t [dot] howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
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| anything that contradicts experience and logic should be abandoned.
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