Read this page in a different language: 🇧🇷 Português (BR)

Since I started working as a full-time Software Engineer at Peerdustry I’ve been having a lot of trouble finding the time to do everything I wanted outside of my work hours. Consequently, I have contributed to FLOSS projects less often than I would like and I have not been able to write a single blog post this year. However, I have had some progress recently in organizing my time. Regarding the writing habit, I will try a more minimalist approach to improve my frequency by writing short texts with some quick notes or tips that are useful to others and myself in the future.

This is my first post where I apply this approach. It has a little tip about how to initialize your Ruby objects passing named arguments with a Hash.

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In a PORO - Plain Old Ruby Object, the usual way to assign values to the attributes of a new object is through the arguments of the initialize method, as illustrated by the snippet below:

class Person
  def initialize(name, email, address, phone)
    @name = name
    @email = email
    @address = address
    @phone = phone
  end
end

person = Person.new("Arthur", "arthur@example.com", nil, "+55 11 999999999")

The initialize method follows the same rules of any other method in Ruby, for instance, the parameters must be passed in exactly the same order in which they were declared. Unlike, the Ruby on Rails framework (RoR), more specifically the ActiveRecord, provides a very convenient way to assign values to the object’s attributes of your model classes with a Hash, as shown below:

person = Person.new(name: "Arthur", phone: "+55 11 999999999", email: "arthur@example.com")

With this approach, we need neither to pass nil values nor to follow any pre-defined order of arguments, since the arguments based on a Hash enable ‘named arguments’. Such behavior is also provided by the module ActiveModel::Model, which is very useful for including in your Rails App’s specific domain objects, such as Service Objects, since this module is packaged within the framework. Besides the support for initializing objects with a hash, the ActiveModel::Model module adds other behaviors to your classes that you may not be interested in, such as model name introspections, conversions, translations and validations.

However, if you are not using Rails, but still want to initialize your objects with Hashes, you can create a generic module with the single purpose of implementing such behavior and include it into your classes.

module HashBasedInit
  def initialize(args)
    args.each do |key, value|
      send("#{key}=", value)
    end
  end
end

class Person
  include HashBasedInit

  attr_accessor :name, :email, :address, :phone
end

person = Person.new(name: "Arthur", phone: "+55 11 999999999", email: "arthur@example.com")

Note that it is necessary to declare accessing methods to your attributes as we did in the Person class through the attr_accessor method. Now, we only need to include the HashBasedInit module in your other classes of your project and that’s it.

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Let’s get moving on! ;)