What's the preferred way to use helper methods in Ruby?

ruby

Solution

The module approach is the direction I would take. I prefer it because of its flexibility and how nicely it allows you to organize your code. I suppose you could argue that they are just another form of mixin. I always think of mixins as direct extensions of a particular class

class Foo
  def hello
    'Hello'
  end
end

class Foo
  def allo
    'Allo?'
  end
end

f = Foo.new
f.hello => 'Hello'
f.allo => 'Allo?'

That always seems very specific, whereas the module approach can extend any class you include it in.

Peer

Problem

Disclaimer: Although I'm asking in context of a Rails application, I'm not talking about Rails helpers (i.e. view helpers) Let's say I have a helper method/function: ``` def dispatch_job(job = {}) #Do something end ``` Now I want to use this from several different places (mostly controllers, but also a few BackgrounDRb workers) What's the preferred way to do this? I can think of two possibilities: 1. Use a class and make the helper a static method: ``` class MyHelper def self.dispatch_job(job = {}) end end class MyWorker def run MyHelper.dispatch_job(...) end end ``` 2. Use a module and include the method into whatever class I need this functionality ``` module MyHelper def self.dispatch_job(job = {}) end end class MyWorker include MyHelper def run dispatch_job(...) end end ``` 3. Other possibilities I don't know yet ``` ... ``` The first one is more Java-like, but I'm not sure if the second one is really an appropriate use of Ruby's modules.

Original source