# Becoming Have you ever used delegation libraries, but found them a bit unsatisfactory? Delegation is awesome, but many Ruby libraries love their metaprogramming, and so they expect class names to match up. This often screws up delegation. Becoming allows your objects to have 'becomings' that make them have extended functionality. They still have the same class as they did before, but now they're just... different. ## Installation Add this line to your application's Gemfile: gem 'becoming' And then execute: $ bundle Or install it yourself as: $ gem install becoming ## Usage For example, let's imagine you're writing a Rails form: ```ruby # a model that looks like this User = Struct.new(:first_name, :last_name) # in the controller @user = User.new("Steve", "Klabnik") # in the view <%= form_for @user do |f| %> ``` This does reflection on the class of the `@user`, generating HTML like this: ```html
``` This is mega awesome. But, let's say that we want to add some new presentation methods on our `User`. So we make a class: ```ruby class FullNameUser def initialize(user) @user = user end def full_name "#{@user.first_name} #{@user.last_name}" end def method_missing(m, *args, &blk) @user.send(m, *args, &blk) end end ``` We update our controller to use this new object: ```ruby user = User.new("Steve", "Klabnik") @user = FullNameUser.new(user) ``` Now, our form... does the wrong thing: ```html ``` Drat! So what do we do? Answer: make your object have a becoming: ``` # in the model User = Struct.new(:first_name, :last_name) do include Becoming end # your 'decorator' module FullNamed def full_name "#{first_name} #{last_name}" end end # in the controller @user = User.new("Steve", "Klabnik") @user.becoming(FullNamed) ``` Now, your form will generate the same HTML as before, and everything is just peachy. ### How does it work? Magic. ### Is it any good? Yes. ### What's the catch? You can only use this with Ruby 2.0, sorry. ## Contributing 1. Fork it 2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b my-new-feature`) 3. Commit your changes (`git commit -am 'Add some feature'`) 4. Push to the branch (`git push origin my-new-feature`) 5. Create new Pull Request ## Thanks Shout-outs go to Avdi Grimm, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Without them, this gem wouldn't exist.