Question

I have a DSL – like piece of Ruby code that looks like this:

Activity.new('20-06-2012') do
  Eat.log do |l|
    l.duration = 0.30
    l.priority = 5
  end
  Work.log do |l|
    l.duration = 2
    l.priority = 3
  end
end

Every time the log() method is called, a Log object is instantiated (behind the scenes) with the block passed to the method (the block is passed on to the Log object’s constructor). My question is, is there a way to collect all the returns from the log() method? In the example above, the return value of the outermost block is the last call to log(). But I want to get all the calls’ results in an array, not just the last one.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Your internal DSL is still too Ruby-like, you may refactor it to look something like this:

activity '20-06-2012' do
  log :eat do
    duration 0.30
    priority 5
  end
  log :work do
    duration 2
    priority 3
  end
end

Now capture the calls in your instance_eval and accumulate the values in an internal array, the usual DSL stuff.