Question

I find myself using hash arguments to constructors quite a bit, especially when writing DSLs for configuration or other bits of API that the end user will be exposed to. What I end up doing is something like the following:

class Example

    PROPERTIES = [:name, :age]

    PROPERTIES.each { |p| attr_reader p }

    def initialize(args)
        PROPERTIES.each do |p|
            self.instance_variable_set "@#{p}", args[p] if not args[p].nil?
        end
    end

end

Is there no more idiomatic way to achieve this? The throw-away constant and the symbol to string conversion seem particularly egregious.

Answer 1

You don’t need the constant, but I don’t think you can eliminate symbol-to-string:

class Example
  attr_reader :name, :age

  def initialize args
    args.each do |k,v|
      instance_variable_set("@#{k}", v) unless v.nil?
    end
  end
end
#=> nil
e1 = Example.new :name => 'foo', :age => 33
#=> #<Example:0x3f9a1c @name="foo", @age=33>
e2 = Example.new :name => 'bar'
#=> #<Example:0x3eb15c @name="bar">
e1.name
#=> "foo"
e1.age
#=> 33
e2.name
#=> "bar"
e2.age
#=> nil

BTW, you might take a look (if you haven’t already) at the Struct class generator class, it’s somewhat similar to what you are doing, but no hash-type initialization (but I guess it wouldn’t be hard to make adequate generator class).

HasProperties

Trying to implement hurikhan’s idea, this is what I came to:

module HasProperties
  attr_accessor :props
  
  def has_properties *args
    @props = args
    instance_eval { attr_reader *args }
  end

  def self.included base
    base.extend self
  end

  def initialize(args)
    args.each {|k,v|
      instance_variable_set "@#{k}", v if self.class.props.member?(k)
    } if args.is_a? Hash
  end
end

class Example
  include HasProperties
  
  has_properties :foo, :bar
  
  # you'll have to call super if you want custom constructor
  def initialize args
    super
    puts 'init example'
  end
end

e = Example.new :foo => 'asd', :bar => 23
p e.foo
#=> "asd"
p e.bar
#=> 23

As I’m not that proficient with metaprogramming, I made the answer community wiki so anyone’s free to change the implementation.

Struct.hash_initialized

Expanding on Marc-Andre’s answer, here is a generic, Struct based method to create hash-initialized classes:

class Struct
  def self.hash_initialized *params
    klass = Class.new(self.new(*params))
  
    klass.class_eval do
      define_method(:initialize) do |h|
        super(*h.values_at(*params))
      end
    end
    klass
  end
end

# create class and give it a list of properties
MyClass = Struct.hash_initialized :name, :age

# initialize an instance with a hash
m = MyClass.new :name => 'asd', :age => 32
p m
#=>#<struct MyClass name="asd", age=32>