In Ruby, suppose I have a class Foo
to allow me to catalogue my large collection of Foos. It's a fundamental law of nature that all Foos are green and spherical, so I have defined class methods as follows:
class Foo
def self.colour
"green"
end
def self.is_spherical?
true
end
end
This lets me do
Foo.colour # "green"
but not
my_foo = Foo.new
my_foo.colour # Error!
despite the fact that my_foo
is plainly green.
Obviously, I could define an instance method colour
which calls self.class.colour
, but that gets unwieldy if I have many such fundamental characteristics.
I can also presumably do it by defining method_missing
to try the class for any missing methods, but I'm unclear whether this is something I should be doing or an ugly hack, or how to do it safely (especially as I'm actually under ActiveRecord in Rails, which I understand does some Clever Fun Stuff with method_missing).
What would you recommend?