Rdoc - can I choose which methods are "attributes"?

ruby-talk
1

Sam Roberts wrote:

I thought I saw discussion about this once, but I don’t see anything in
the current rdoc docs (RDoc Documentation).

Treating methods as attrs if they were defined with attr, attr_reader,
etc. seems to break the whole point of uniform access, its just
an implmentation technique.

The defaults are often great, but is there any way, say a “#
:attr(r,w):” comment, that I can use to get some of my methods to show
up in the “Attributes” section of the docs?

This isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but maybe it helps.

The rdoc help says:

   --accessor, -A accessorname[,..]
              comma separated list of additional class methods
              that should be treated like 'attr_reader' and
              friends. Option may be repeated. Each accessorname
              may have '=text' appended, in which case that text
              appears where the r/w/rw appears for normal accessor

So for example if you have

class Person
string_attribute :name
end

and you have defined a class method #string_attribute in some way, the
the rdoc option

–accessor string_attribute=string

will cause “name [string]” to show up in the Attributes section of the
doc for Person.

2

Quoteing vjoel@PATH.Berkeley.EDU, on Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 06:19:37AM +0900:

Sam Roberts wrote:
>I thought I saw discussion about this once, but I don't see anything in
>the current rdoc docs (http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/\).
>
>Treating methods as attrs if they were defined with attr, attr_reader,
>etc. seems to break the whole point of uniform access, its just
>an implmentation technique.
>
>The defaults are often great, but is there any way, say a "#
>:attr(r,w):" comment, that I can use to get some of my methods to show
>up in the "Attributes" section of the docs?

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but maybe it helps.

The rdoc help says:

      --accessor, -A accessorname[,..]
                 comma separated list of additional class methods
                 that should be treated like 'attr_reader' and
                 friends. Option may be repeated. Each accessorname
                 may have '=text' appended, in which case that text
                 appears where the r/w/rw appears for normal accessor

So for example if you have

  class Person
    string_attribute :name
  end

I guess I could abuse this mechanism to do something like:

ri --accessor an_attr_r=r

  class Class
    def an_attr_r(*args)
    end
  end

  class Foo
    def group
      @foo * 1
    end

    an_attr_r :group
  end

I don't know if this would work, exactly, maybe this is the wrong way to
define an_attr_r, but even if it did work, its a pretty strikingly
cumbersome way to say that Foo#group should show up in the Attribute
section as "group [r]"!

Sam