Published on

attr_accessor in Ruby

Let's say you have a class Person

class Person
end

person = Person.new
person.name # => no method error

Obviously we never defined method name. Let's do that

class Person
  def name
    @name # simply returning an instance variable @name
  end
end

person = Person.new
person.name # => nil
person.name = "Dennis" # => no method error

Aha, we can read the name, but that doesn't mean we can assign the name. Those are two different methods. The former is called reader and latter is called writer. We didn't create the write yet so let's do that.

class Person
  def name
    @name
  end

  def name=(str)
    @name = str
  end
end

person = Person.new
person.name = 'Dennis'
person.name # => "Dennis"

Awesome. Now we can write and read instance variable @name using reader and writer methods. Except, this is done so frequently, why waste time writing these methods every time? We can do it easier.

class Person
  attr_reader :name
  attr_writer :name
end

Even this can get repetitive. When you want both reader and writer just use accessor!

class Person
  attr_accessor :name
end

person = Person.new
person.name = "Dennis"
person.name # => "Dennis"

Works the same way! And guess what: the instance variable @name in our person object will be set just like when we did it manually, so you can use it in other methods.

class Person
  attr_accessor :name

  def greeting
    "Hello #{@name}"
  end
end

person = Person.new
person.name = "Dennis"
person.greeting # => "Hello Dennis"

That's it.

Simple implementation

class Module
  def var( method_name )
    inst_variable_name = "@#{method_name}".to_sym
    define_method method_name do
      instance_variable_get inst_variable_name
    end
    define_method "#{method_name}=" do |new_value|
      instance_variable_set inst_variable_name, new_value
    end
  end
end

class Foo
  var :bar
end

f = Foo.new
p f.bar     #=> nil
f.bar = 42
p f.bar     #=> 42

References