Ruby Language Classes Access Levels

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Example

Ruby has three access levels. They are public, private and protected.

Methods that follow the private or protected keywords are defined as such. Methods that come before these are implicitly public methods.

Public Methods

A public method should describe the behavior of the object being created. These methods can be called from outside the scope of the created object.

class Cat
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end

  def speak
    puts "I'm #{@name} and I'm 2 years old"
  end
  
  ...
end

new_cat = Cat.new("garfield")
#=> <Cat:0x2321868 @name="garfield">
 
new_cat.speak
#=> I'm garfield and I'm 2 years old

These methods are public ruby methods, they describe the behavior for initializing a new cat and the behavior of the speak method.

public keyword is unnecessary, but can be used to escape private or protected

def MyClass
  def first_public_method
  end

  private

  def private_method
  end

  public

  def second_public_method
  end
end

Private Methods

Private methods are not accessible from outside of the object. They are used internally by the object. Using the cat example again:

class Cat
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end

  def speak
    age = calculate_cat_age # here we call the private method 
    puts "I'm #{@name} and I'm #{age} years old"
  end

  private
     def calculate_cat_age
       2 * 3 - 4 
     end
end

my_cat = Cat.new("Bilbo")
my_cat.speak #=> I'm Bilbo and I'm 2 years old
my_cat.calculate_cat_age #=> NoMethodError: private method `calculate_cat_age' called for #<Cat:0x2321868 @name="Bilbo">

As you can see in the example above, the newly created Cat object has access to the calculate_cat_age method internally. We assign the variable age to the result of running the private calculate_cat_age method which prints the name and age of the cat to the console.

When we try and call the calculate_cat_age method from outside the my_cat object, we receive a NoMethodError because it's private. Get it?

Protected Methods

Protected methods are very similar to private methods. They cannot be accessed outside the instance of object in the same way private methods can't be. However, using the self ruby method, protected methods can be called within the context of an object of the same type.

class Cat
  def initialize(name, age)
    @name = name
    @age = age
  end

  def speak
    puts "I'm #{@name} and I'm #{@age} years old"
  end

  # this == method allows us to compare two objects own ages. 
  # if both Cat's have the same age they will be considered equal.
  def ==(other)
     self.own_age == other.own_age
  end

  protected
     def own_age
        self.age
     end
end

cat1 = Cat.new("ricky", 2)
=> #<Cat:0x007fe2b8aa4a18 @name="ricky", @age=2>

cat2 = Cat.new("lucy", 4)
=> #<Cat:0x008gfb7aa6v67 @name="lucy", @age=4>

cat3 = Cat.new("felix", 2)
=> #<Cat:0x009frbaa8V76 @name="felix", @age=2>

You can see we've added an age parameter to the cat class and created three new cat objects with the name and age. We are going to call the own_age protected method to compare the age's of our cat objects.

cat1 == cat2
=> false

cat1 == cat3
=> true

Look at that, we were able to retrieve cat1's age using the self.own_age protected method and compare it against cat2's age by calling cat2.own_age inside of cat1.



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