Random Ruby Tricks: Struct.new

One of my favorite classes in Ruby is Struct, but I feel like many Rubyists don't know when to take advantage of it. The standard library has a lot of junk in it, but Struct and OStruct are super awesome.

Struct

If you haven't used Struct before, here's the documentation of Struct from the Ruby standard library.

Structs are used to create super simple classes with some instance variables and a simple constructor. Check it:

Struct.new("Point", :x, :y) #=> Struct::Point
origin = Struct::Point.new(0,0) #=> #<struct Struct::Point x=0, y=0>

Nobody uses it this way, though. Here's the way I first saw it used:

class Point < Struct.new(:x, :y)
end

origin = Point.new(0,0)

Wait, what? Inherit...from an instance of something? Yep!

1.9.3p194 :001 > Struct.new(:x,:y)
 => #<Class:0x007f8fc38da2e8> 

Struct.new gives us a Class. We can inherit from this just like any other Class. Neat!

However, if you're gonna make an empty class like this, I prefer this way:

Point = Struct.new(:x, :y)
origin = Point(0,0)

Yep. Classes are just constants, so we assign a constant to that particular Class.

OStruct

OStructs are like Struct on steroids. Check it:

require 'ostruct'

origin = OpenStruct.new
origin.x = 0
origin.y = 0

origin = OpenStruct.new(:x => 0, :y => 0)

OStructs are particularly good for configuration objects. Since any method works to set data in an OStruct, you don't have to worry about enumerating every single option that you need:

require 'ostruct'

def set_options
  opts = OpenStruct.new
  yield opts
  opts
end

options = set_options do |o|
  o.set_foo = true
  o.load_path = "whatever:something"
end

options #=> #<OpenStruct set_foo=true, load_path="whatever:something"> 

Neat, eh?

Structs for domain concepts

You can use Structs to help reify domain concepts into simple little classes. For example, say we have this code, which uses a date:

class Person
  attr_accessor :name, :day, :month, :year

  def initialize(opts = {})
    @name = opts[:name]
    @day = opts[:day]
    @month = opts[:month]
    @year = opts[:year]
  end

  def birthday
    "#@day/#@month/#@year"
  end
end

and we have this spec

$:.unshift("lib")
require 'person'

describe Person do
  it "compares birthdays" do
    joe = Person.new(:name => "Joe", :day => 5, :month => 6, :year => 1986)
    jon = Person.new(:name => "Jon", :day => 7, :month => 6, :year => 1986)

    joe.birthday.should == jon.birthday
  end
end

It fails, of course. Like this:

$ rspec
F

Failures:

  1) Person compares birthdays
     Failure/Error: joe.birthday.should == jon.birthday
       expected: "7/6/1986"
            got: "5/6/1986" (using ==)
     # ./spec/person_spec.rb:9:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 0.00053 seconds
1 example, 1 failure

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/person_spec.rb:5 # Person compares birthdays

Now. We have these two birthdays. In this case, we know about why the test was failing, but imagine this failure in a real codebase. Are these month/day/year or day/month/year? You can't tell, it could be either. If we switched our code to this:

class Person
  attr_accessor :name, :birthday

  Birthday = Struct.new(:day, :month, :year)

  def initialize(opts = {})
    @name = opts[:name]
    @birthday = Birthday.new(opts[:day], opts[:month], opts[:year])
  end
end

We get this failure instead:

$ rspec
F

Failures:

  1) Person compares birthdays
     Failure/Error: joe.birthday.should == jon.birthday
       expected: #<struct Person::Birthday day=7, month=6, year=1986>
            got: #<struct Person::Birthday day=5, month=6, year=1986> (using ==)
       Diff:
       @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
       -#<struct Person::Birthday day=7, month=6, year=1986>
       +#<struct Person::Birthday day=5, month=6, year=1986>
     # ./spec/person_spec.rb:9:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 0.00092 seconds
1 example, 1 failure

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/person_spec.rb:5 # Person compares birthdays

We have a way, way more clear failure. We can clearly see that its our days that are off.

Of course, there are other good reasons to package related instance variables into Structs, too: it makes more conceptual sense. This code represents our intent better: a Person has a Birthday, they don't have three unrelated numbers stored inside them somehow. If we need to add something to our concept of birthdays, we now have a place to put it.