Using Metaprogramming to Pass an Argument to a Rails Module

Refactoring is my favorite hobby. Nothing feels quite as satisfying than extracting some common methods to an elegantly named module.

Quickly though, I usually run into trouble - how exactly am I supposed to pass an argument to a module in Ruby? The answer is: through some metaprogramming! (such a scary word)

Let’s draft up a (somewhat contrived) example using Ruby on Rails.

Imagine a Facebook-like application with the following models and Likeable module:

Through the Likeable module, we can now retrieve the total number of likes for any instance of the Image (or Video) class with the following pattern: Image.find(params[:id]).total_likes.

That’s pretty neat.

Now, let’s assume that the two classes handle differently which users get notified when a new like is submitted. As it’s related to likes, we’d like to include this behaviour within the Likeable module.

However, Ruby does not provide an easy way to pass an argument to a method defined within a module. We could of course add some conditional logic to the module method, but that would become messy quickly as we create other classes mixed in the Likeable module.

Let’s not do that.

Instead, we’d like to be able to directly define who should be notified for each class within the model, like so:

Turns out, we can use some metaprogramming to mimic the passing of an argument:

Here’s what this code does:

• Lines 5-7: when the module Likeable is included within the class, the (Rails) class attribute users_to_be_notified is created.
• Lines 18-22: Within the Likeable module is defined the class method notifiable_users. This method sets users_to_be_notified to the parameters.
• Line 34: notifiable_users :creator, :tagged_users: the notifiable_users class method is called with two arguments (representing ActiveRecord attributes). This sets the class attribute users_to_be_notified to [:creator, :tagged_users] (for the Video class).
• Line 14: we retrieve the values behind :creator and :tagged_users for the specific instances of the class, and notify them individually.

You can now create a new class and easily define who gets notified for new likes:

There you go!