From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2007-04-07T16:06:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Method constant arguments

Alexandre Rosenfeld wrote:
> Hi, I'm new to ruby, and I'm loving it so far.
> 
> I want to call a method with some parameters that would indicate a
> state, so most of them would be only a true or false value, however
> that's not very good to read when calling the method. Like this:
> 
>   def dosomework(directory, overwrite = false, use_id_as_filename =
> true)
> 
>   dosomework('/', true, false)
> 
> I would like to call that function with some readable parameters,
> something like this:
> 
>   dosomework('/', Overwrite, UseIdAsFilename)
> 
> I have tried array arguments and hashes, but I didn't like those
> solutions. What would be the recommended way to do that in Ruby?

I've seen code that does this:

def dosomework(directory, *opts)
   if opts.include? :overwrite
     dosomething
   end
   if opts.include? :use_id_as_filename
     dosomethingelse
   end
   dofoo(directory)
end

I don't know if that's useful at all... it'd certainly be quite easy to 
write a Struct-like class that you could use in place of the opts array 
if you wanted to tidy it up.

-- 
Alex