Delegating methods in Ruby

Sometimes, when constructing a compound object, we are interested in exporting functionality while retaining encapsulation. For example, suppose we have a Secretary class:

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class Secretary
  def send_fax(destination, fax_contents)
    puts 'Sending fax "%s" to %s' % [fax_contents, destination]
  end

  def answer_call(call)
    # ...
  end

  # ...
end

Our Secretary provides a lot of useful functionality, that our Boss class would like to have. Boss would like to be able to say that he can send a fax, without having the user explicitly request his Secretary beforehand. The same goes for a lot of other methods Secretary provides. Instead of writing a stub function for each of these methods, it would be nice to do the following:

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class Boss
  delegate_method :my_secretary, :send_fax, :answer_call

  def initialize
    @my_secretary = Secretary.new
  end
end

john = Boss.new
john.send_fax("Donald Trump", "YOU'RE fired")

Here’s how we can get this to happen:

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class Class
  def delegate_method(instance_var_name, *method_names)
    method_names.each do |method_name|
      define_method(method_name) do |*args|
        instance_var = instance_variable_get("@%s" % instance_var_name)
        instance_var.send(method_name, *args)
      end
    end
  end
end

This solution does have its drawbacks - it will not work for methods which are meant to accept blocks. I’m not sure how to get that to happen, short of using a string-based class_eval, which I’m not very fond of. (I find eval to be, well, evil…)