Question

Is there a way to create custom deprecation notices for methods and/or associations in my application that I plan on removing and want to log their usage? I have a relationship in one of my models that I don’t want to use moving forward and plan to refactor the code at a later time. I would like to create a notice in my development log every time that method is called.

I have seen deprecation notices in Ruby/Rails when using certain methods, and figure there has to be an easy way to do this.

Something like…

irb(main):001:0> 1.id
(irb):1: warning: Object#id will be deprecated; use Object#object_id
=> 3

Answer 1

In Rails 3 you can use the : “deprecate” method from ActiveSupport:

class Example
  def foo
  end

  deprecate :foo
end

It will create an alias for your method and output a warning with a stack trace. You can also use parts of this functionality directly, e.g:

ActiveSupport::Deprecation.warn("Message")

It will output the stack trace along with the message.