From: Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@...>
Date: 2006-03-30T17:46:27+09:00
Subject: Re: accessing the currently running method


>
> There is binding_of_caller which might or might not help you - 
> depending on what you want to do.
>
I'll look into it thanks

> Another option is to use set_trace_func to set up something that keeps 
> track of method invocations.
>
>> No biggy, just interested if anyone else has ever wanted/needed to 
>> get this info in a running program, and what they did to do it
>
>
> Certainly, from time to time.  What do *you* need it for?

I currently have a yaml file

pg_401:
  corp_nm_kn: 'JP text...' <= corprate name (kana)
  etc

and a ruby script that uses watir to execute a set of web app page 
transitions whilst filling in the data read from the yaml file.

in standard watir
ie.text_field(:id, 'some id value for text field').set(v)

as I'm reading the data from a yaml file I get a hash of hashes (ok I 
could get an object or anything else, but at the moment I get back a 
hash of hashes)

so my calls to watir look like

ie.text_field(:id, 
test_data['pg_401']['corp_name_field']).set(test_data['pg_401']['corp_name']

I've managed to reduce this to

text :id, :pg_401, :corp_name which is expanded to the correct call 
using method_missing, I'd like to reduce this further to

text :corp_name

I can remove the :pg_401 by knowing the currently executing method, I 
can remove the :id by simply trying all options :id, :name, :matches (I 
think) and rescuing the Exception raised.

Ultimately, I'd rather have all these field_type, :field_name pairs 
defined in yaml and then create a script on the fly and execute it.  At 
the moment, the qc team will have to edit two files (data in yaml 
format, and script in ruby).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of text typed by the qc team (who 
will be writing these scripts)?:

1 - because it's possible to reduce the workload
2 - because some of the screens (pg_XXX) have more than 400 fields that 
must be entered (not my fault, I had no hand in designing the UI, for 
that you can blaim HP japan)
3 - because I'm starting to get why people think that DSLs and lisp 
macros are a good thing (I think I reached the tipping point of 
understanding, when I saw loads of my first calls to the watir library 
and thought, "That's irritatingly repetitive, surely the computer can do 
that kind of work for me").

Currently I have

caller[0][/in: `.+(pg_\d{3})/,1]
which adequately returns the current method (given the current 
convention of naming the methods something with the page number in them)

I tried
class Object
  def current_method
    caller[0][/in: `.+(pg_\d{3})/,1]
  end
end

but calls to this inside a method_missing method produce nil - not sure 
why, but obviously I need to study more ruby to understand why that 
doesn't work.  Including current_method (as defined above) in module 
Kernel also doesn't do the trick, but having the caller[0][/in: 
`.+(pg_\d{3})/,1] inside the method_missing method works.

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of a couple of new things
Kev