From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2006-10-16T22:35:16+09:00
Subject: Re: RDoc vs metaprogramming

On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 13:31:18 +0900, ara.t.howard wrote:

> On Sun, 15 Oct 2006, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have developed a library to read and parse XSPF playlists. Most of the
>> methods (90%) are metagenerated using something like this:
>>
>> class XSPFBlah
>>
>>  attributes = %w{ attrib1 attrib2 }
>>  attributes.each do |attrib|
>>    define_method(attrib.to_sym) { do_something }
>>  end
>>
>>  def initialize(source)
>>    do something
>>  end
>> end
>>
>> RDoc does not find the metaprogrammed methods, therefore the documentation is
>> useless. Is there anything I could do to get RDoc to work?
>>
>> Thank you.
> 
> this is one reason using module_eval(string) is better than using
> define_method et al.  eg
> 
>    $META_RDOC = ENV['META_RDOC']
> 
>    class XSPFBlah
> 
>     attributes = %w{ attrib1 attrib2 }
> 
>     attributes.each do |attrib|
>       code <<-code
>         def #{ attrib }()
>           do_something
>          end
>       code
>       module_eval code
> 
>       if $META_RDOC
>         open($META_RDOC, 'a+') do |f|
>           f.puts code
>         end
>       end
>     end
> 
>     def initialize(source)
>       do something
>     end
>    end
> 
> 
> obviously you need to tweak this a little, so the methds land in XSPFBlah, for
> instance.  but it's immensely useful both for debugging and for documenting.
> 

> probably not what you wanted to here i know...

Thanks for the tip. I certainly wanted to know, and last time I asked here,
nobody knew the answer.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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