[Talking-Ruby] Forwardable module provides delegation of specified methods to a designated object

Posted on 2021-07-31 Edited on 2023-09-02 In Programming Language , Ruby , Talking-Ruby Views: Word count in article: 3k Reading time ≈ 3 mins.

Forwardable

The Forwardable module provides delegation of specified methods to a designated object, using the methods def_delegator and def_delegators.

forwardable.rb provides single-method delegation via the #def_delegator and #def_delegators methods. For full-class delegation via DelegateClass, see delegate.rb.

For example, say you have a class RecordCollection which contains an array @records. You could provide the lookup method record_number(), which simply calls [] on the @records array, like this:

require 'forwardable'

class RecordCollection
  attr_accessor :records
  extend Forwardable
  def_delegator :@records, :[], :record_number
end

We can use the lookup method like so:

1
2
3

r = RecordCollection.new
r.records = [4,5,6]
r.record_number(0)  # => 4

Further, if you wish to provide the methods size, <<, and map, all of which delegate to @records, this is how you can do it:

class RecordCollection # re-open RecordCollection class
  def_delegators :@records, :size, :<<, :map
end

r = RecordCollection.new
r.records = [1,2,3]
r.record_number(0)   # => 1
r.size               # => 3
r << 4               # => [1, 2, 3, 4]
r.map { |x| x * 2 }  # => [2, 4, 6, 8]

You can even extend regular objects with Forwardable.

my_hash = Hash.new
my_hash.extend Forwardable              # prepare object for delegation
my_hash.def_delegator "STDOUT", "puts"  # add delegation for STDOUT.puts()
my_hash.puts "Howdy!"

Another example

You could use Forwardable as an alternative to inheritance, when you don’t want to inherit all methods from the superclass. For instance, here is how you might add a range of Array instance methods to a new class Queue:

class Queue
  extend Forwardable

  def initialize
    @q = [ ]    # prepare delegate object
  end

  # setup preferred interface, enq() and deq()...
  def_delegator :@q, :push, :enq
  def_delegator :@q, :shift, :deq

  # support some general Array methods that fit Queues well
  def_delegators :@q, :clear, :first, :push, :shift, :size
end

q = Queue.new
q.enq 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
q.push 6

q.shift    # => 1
while q.size > 0
  puts q.deq
end

q.enq "Ruby", "Perl", "Python"
puts q.first
q.clear
puts q.first

This should output:

2
3
4
5
6
Ruby
nil

More examples

class MyQueue
  CONST = 1
  extend Forwardable
  attr_reader :queue
  def initialize
    @queue = []
  end

  def_delegator :@queue, :push, :mypush
  def_delegator 'MyQueue::CONST', :to_i
end

q = MyQueue.new
q.mypush 42
q.queue    #=> [42]
q.push 23  #=> NoMethodError
q.to_i     #=> 1