localocracy-observational

= Observational

How many times have you seen this in a rails app?

class User after_create :deliver_welcome_message

protected
def deliver_welcome_message
  Notifier.deliver_welcome_message(self)
end

end

Why is the user concerned with the delivery of his own welcome message? It seems like the Notifier should be responsible for that.

Observational makes it possible to make it the Notifier's responsibility, using the observer pattern.

The equivalent of the above example is:

class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base observes :user, :invokes => :deliver_welcome_message, :after => :create

def welcome_message(user)
  # do mailer stuff here
end

end

After a user is created, Notifier.deliver_welcome_message(that_user) will be invoked.

It's also possible to specify that the observer method gets called with a specific attribute from the observed object.

class Creditor observes :message, :invokes => :use_credit, :with => :creator, :after => :create

def use_credit(user)
  # do something
end

end

After a message is created, Creditor.use_credit(message.creator) will be called.

Observational supports all of ActiveRecord's callbacks.

== YARDOC

Observational uses YARD, because it's a million times better than RDoc. You can find the docs at {docs.github.com/giraffesoft/observational}[http://docs.github.com/giraffesoft/observational]

== General Purpose Observers

Observational can also be used to add observers to ruby classes that aren't related to active_record. But, that's not documented yet :-).

== Copyright

Copyright (c) 2009 James Golick. See LICENSE for details.