~/Replacing a method on an instance in Ruby

18 December 2010

I just read a post by David Tchepak where he describes a way of replacing a method on an instance of a class on the fly, allowing the replacement to close over locals. This would be useful for unit testing at the least. The technique that Dave uses is cool – this is a simplified version:

name = "Anonymous Dave"
greeter.extend Module.new do
  self.send(:define_method, :say_hello) do
    puts "G'day #{name}"
  end
end

This is replacing the greeter.say_hello method with the closure on the fourth line. Since I’m spoiled by C#’s lambda syntax, I wanted to get this onto one line:

greeter.extend Module.new { self.send(:define_method, :say_hello) { puts "G'day #{name}" }}

Nice, but there is a bit of repetition. .extend is a method on the Object class, which extends the instance with the new module. Unfortunately Object doesn’t have a method to just replace a single method. The following opens the Object and moves much of the boilerplate code into a new method to do that:

class Object
  def redefine(name, &block)
    self.extend Module.new {
      self.send(:define_method, name, block)
    }
  end
end

redefine probably isn’t the best name, since there is no need for the named method to exist before redefining it. This is the new way to replace the say_hello method:

greeter.redefine(:say_hello) { puts "G'day #{name}" }

Methods with parameters can be defined in the same way:

greeter.redefine(:say_hello_to) { |another_name| puts "Hello to #{another_name}" }
greeter.say_hello_to 'Dave'

Very cool. Many thanks to Dave Tchepak for his article, otherwise I wouldn’t have thought this was possible at all.