Alias and subclasses

Ruby
1

Hi everyone,

The quick version:
Is there a Ruby-ian way to get the alias method to propagate through
subclasses?

The longer one:
I’ve got two classes with some simple inheritance:

class Ticket
def unreserve
…
end
alias unhold unreserve
end

class FamilyTicket < Ticket
def unreserve
…
end
end

FamilyTicket adds a bit of functionality to Ticket, and are reserved
in different ways, so it’s unreserve method overwrites its parent
class. I would still like to use the aliased method name - e.g.
ft = FamilyTicket.new
ft.unhold

However, the alias refers to Ticket#unreserve, not
FamilyTicket#unreserve. From the docs I understand that this is by
design, so my question is, is there a more Ruby-like way of doing the
following?
class Ticket
def unreserve
…
end

def unhold
unreserve
end
end

Cheers,
Tim C.

2

Tim C. wrote:

def unreserve

class Ticket
def unreserve
…
end

def unhold
    unreserve
end

end

Alias it again?

I talk about this topic (for monkey patching, but it would apply to
subclassing as well) at Monkey patching and aliases - Testing 1,2,3... — LiveJournal if
anyone is interested.

Regards,

Dan

3

On 6/24/07, Tim C. [email protected] wrote:

class Ticket
end
following?
class Ticket
def unreserve
…
end

    def unhold
            unreserve
    end

end

Of course now you have the problem of if the sublass decides to override
unhold instead of unreserve. The real solution to this problem IMO is to
not
start aliasing things in the first place. A given method should have one
name. (I know Ruby does it with map/collect etc., but that doesn’t mean
I
have to agree does it? :slight_smile: )

Cheers,

4

On 6/25/07, Logan C. [email protected] wrote:

Of course now you have the problem of if the sublass decides to override
unhold instead of unreserve. The real solution to this problem IMO is to not
start aliasing things in the first place. A given method should have one
name. (I know Ruby does it with map/collect etc., but that doesn’t mean I
have to agree does it? :slight_smile: )

Also, I always look at this as a feature and not a bug, as in:

alias_method :old_something, :something

def something
#do some hackery
old_something
end