From: anne001 <anne@...>
Date: 2006-07-20T06:50:10+09:00
Subject: Passing the name of an argument and then its value

I have a soap4r created fx to search amazon which has too many
arguments to use comfortably
itemSearchRequest = ItemSearchRequest.new("", "", "", "", "", "", "",
"", "", "", "", "",
"","","","","","","gabin","","","","","","","","","","","","Books","","","","","")?

I would like to only type the name of the key search and the value. I
came up with some code which almost works. Can I do simpler, easier to
read than this? or more principled, more elegant?
------------------>
#Here is a simplified version of the fx, with just 2 elements
class ItemSearchRequest
  attr_accessor :actor
  attr_accessor :artist
  def initialize(actor = nil, artist = nil)
    @actor = actor
    @artist = artist
  end
end
itemSearchRequest = ItemSearchRequest.new
p itemSearchRequest.inspect
itemSearchRequest = ItemSearchRequest.new("", "dud")
p itemSearchRequest.inspect
itemSearchRequest = ItemSearchRequest.new(artist="dod")
p itemSearchRequest.inspect

-------->
# this is the method I wrote to simplify the accessing of the fx
def namedrequest(fxname,hash)
  nameinfo=eval(fxname).new.inspect
  p nameinfo
  # should return something like the following
  # nameinfo="#<ItemSearchRequest:0x25cd4 @artist=nil, @actor=nil>"


command=fxname.slice(0,1).downcase+fxname.slice(1,fxname.length)+"="+fxname+".new("
  namearray=nameinfo.scan(/@(\w+)=/)
    namearray.each{ |key|
      p key
      p key[0]
      command = command +'"'+ (hash[key[0]] || "")+'",'
      }
  #replace last coma with )
  command = command.sub(/,$/,")")
  p command
  eval(command)
end

namedrequest("ItemSearchRequest",{"artist" =>"dod", "actor" =>"dud"})
p itemSearchRequest