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Mixing in Namespaced Classes in Ruby, a Template Method implementation

Today I was searching on a means for mixing in a namespaced class into another class and stumbled onto a gist of mine that I had saved back in October 2013.

Here's what I implemented today, and you'll find a link to the original Gist at the end of this post.

The essence of the approach is to simply call const_set on the base class, _klass, and in this example setting that constant to class of interest via Class.new(ClassOfInterest).

You would also see this being used in specs such as

MyFancyException = Class.new(StandardError)
raise MyFancyException

In this context, the receiver, self is in fact the class in which you call the above, so self.MyFancyException = Class.new(StandardError) would also be perfectly fine, although not strictly idiomatic Ruby, as most often the receiver is implicit.

module Snowden
  module Utility
    extend self

      class Response
        attr_reader :error_message

        def initialize(success: nil, error_message: nil)
          @success       = success
          @error_message = error_message
        end

        def success?
          @success
        end

        def self.success
          new(success: true)
        end

        def self.failure(error_message)
          new(success: false, error_message: error_message)
        end
      end

      module ResponseMixin
        class << self
          def included _klass
            response = Class.new(Utility::Response)
            _klass.const_set :Response, response
          end
        end
      end

  end
end

Ref: Gist