Rails' delegates are even more useful than I knew

File this under “things I wish I’d known about years ago”…

Do you use delegate in Rails? It’s a great way to avoid Law of Demeter violations. Let’s say you’re modeling people, who belong to households:

class Person
  belongs_to :household
  delegate :address, to: household
end

class Household
  # has a string attribute 'address'
end

Now we can get the address of a Person with the Demeter-friendly
person.address, rather than the trainwreck person.household.address.
When we decide suddenly that a person sometimes needs to override its
household’s address, we can change this to:

class Person
  belongs_to :household

  def address
    overriding_address || household.address
  end
end

and we don’t have to change any code which refers to person.address.

But! What about this?

class Person
  # has a string attribute 'name'
end

class Business
  belongs_to :owner, class_name: 'Person'
end

How do we get the name of a business’s owner? We could say
business.owner.name, but that’s a Demeter violation. We could delegate,
but then we’d have business.name, which would be wrong. Luckily, the
authors of delegate have thought of this:

class Business
  belongs_to :owner, class_name: 'Person'
  delegate :name, to: :owner, prefix: true
end

The prefix: true option gives us business.owner_name, which is much
better. You can also specify a custom prefix instead of true.

After doing this manually by defining methods for years, I feel silly to
learn that the prefix option has been around since 2008!

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