Background:
I have a module which declares a number of instance methods
module UsefulThings
def get_file; ...
def delete_file; ...
def format_text(x); ...
end
And I want to call some of these methods from within a class. How you normally do this in ruby is like this:
class UsefulWorker
include UsefulThings
def do_work
format_text("abc")
...
end
end
Problem
include UsefulThings
brings in all of the methods from UsefulThings
. In this case I only want format_text
and explicitly do not want get_file
and delete_file
.
I can see several possible solutions to this:
- Somehow invoke the method directly on the module without including it anywhere
- I don’t know how/if this can be done. (Hence this question)
- Somehow include
Usefulthings
and only bring in some of it’s methods- I also don’t know how/if this can be done
- Create a proxy class, include
UsefulThings
in that, then delegateformat_text
to that proxy instance- This would work, but anonymous proxy classes are a hack. Yuck.
- Split up the module into 2 or more smaller modules
- This would also work, and is probably the best solution I can think of, but I’d prefer to avoid it as I’d end up with a proliferation of dozens and dozens of modules – managing this would be burdensome
Why are there lots of unrelated functions in a single module? It’s ApplicationHelper
from a rails app, which our team has de-facto decided on as the dumping ground for anything not specific enough to belong anywhere else. Mostly standalone utility methods that get used everywhere. I could break it up into seperate helpers, but there’d be 30 of them, all with 1 method each… this seems unproductive