Mark Chavez

Using SimpleDelegator is easy. Let’s say for example after user creation, we want to send the user an email. Here’s one way we might approach this.

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def create
    @user = User.new(params)
    if @user.save
      UserNotifyingService.new(@user).deliver
      redirect_to somewhere
    else
      render :new
    end
  end
end

Plain and simple! No intricacies and it works. However, it feels messy and hard to reuse. What if someplace else, you need to do the same thing? You’ll probably end up having UserNotifyingService scattered around your codebase.

We can implement a Rails callback or even introduce a service object — but let’s try to see if SimpleDelegator solves the problem better.

Hello SimpleDelegator!

Let’s work on the same example but have SimpleDelegator implemented.

# app/models/user_notifier.rb
class UserNotifier < SimpleDelegator
  def save
    user = __getobj__
    if user.save
      UserNotifyingService.new(user).deliver
    end
  end
end

Then in our controller we can write the usual boilerplate for create.

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def create
    @user = build_user

    if @user.save
      # do something
    else
      render :new
    end
  end

  private

  def build_user
    UserNotifier.new(
      User.new(params)
    )
  end
end

The only difference here is we used UserNotifier to build the user that we want to create. In here, UserNotifier uses SimpleDelegator to override the save method and makes sure that an email is sent after it gets persisted.

The thing I like about this is we can wrap them with several more delegators if we think we need to do more. Without relying on other ruby libraries, I feel like this is one way of writing this better.

Happy reading!