Sleight of Hand for the Ruby Man
June 12th, 2008
Chad Humphries pointed me to this tasty bit of code. Since Ruby so graciously lets you open up classes anywhere, it’s nice to know where the right place to debug is. Simply put the following code into a globally accessible place (I just used .irbrc) and you will have the method available.
module Kernel
# which { some_object.some_method() } => ::
def where_is_this_defined(settings={}, &block)
settings[:debug] ||= false
settings[:educated_guess] ||= false
events = []
set_trace_func lambda { |event, file, line, id, binding, classname|
events << { :event => event, :file => file, :line => line, :id => id, :binding => binding, :classname => classname }
if settings[:debug]
puts "event => #{event}"
puts "file => #{file}"
puts "line => #{line}"
puts "id => #{id}"
puts "binding => #{binding}"
puts "classname => #{classname}"
puts ''
end
}
yield
set_trace_func(nil)
events.each do |event|
next unless event[:event] == 'call' or (event[:event] == 'return' and event[:classname].included_modules.include?(ActiveRecord::Associations))
return "#{event[:classname]} received message '#{event[:id]}', Line \##{event[:line]} of #{event[:file]}"
end
# def self.crazy_custom_finder
# return find(:all......)
# end
# return unless event == 'call' or (event == 'return' and classname.included_modules.include?(ActiveRecord::Associations))
# which_file = "Line \##{line} of #{file}"
if settings[:educated_guess] and events.size > 3
event = events[-3]
return "#{event[:classname]} received message '#{event[:id]}', Line \##{event[:line]} of #{event[:file]}"
end
return 'Unable to determine where method was defined.'
end
end
Once you have that you can simply open up script/console or irb and give it a whirl
>> where_is_this_defined {Streamlined.ui_for(:foo)}
=> "Streamlined received message 'ui_for', Line #6 of /Users/abedra/src/someapp/trunk/lib/extensions/streamlined/streamlined.rb"
This tells us that the ui_for method of streamlined is actually being called from an extension that the project made rather than the streamlined plugin itself. This would save you lots of time trying to debug the wrong method! Give it a try.
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on June 15th, 2008 at 07:25 PM It's "sleight." -- Amateur Magician