Ruby protected methods

In addition to public and private methods, Ruby also knows protected methods. Protected visibility does not have an obvious use case, so I thought I’d share an example of how it could be put to use.

Protected methods are mostly unavailable to outside callers, like private methods are. The difference is is, that protected methods can be called by other objects of the same class.

Let us make a point

Consider we have defined a value object Point, consisting of a pair of coordinates:

class Point
  def initialize(x, y)
    @x, @y = x, y
  end
end

The two coordinates are an implementation detail of the value, so we don’t define public attribute reader methods. We can use our new point value like so:

start = Point.new(3, 10)
finish = Point.new(5, 20)
line = Line.new(start, finish)

Value object equality

Since value objects are defined by their contents, we want two points with the same coordinates to be considered equal. This currently is not the case:

Point.new(1, 1) == Point.new(1, 1)
# => false

Ruby lets us override the #== and #eql? methods to implement our own comparison logic. For all intents and purposes, we can use the same logic in these two methods:

class Point
  def initialize(x, y)
    @x, @y = x, y
  end

  def ==(other)
    # TODO
  end
  alias_method :eql?, :==
end

Our custom #== method needs to compare its own coordinates to that of other. The easiest solution is to expose attribute reader methods:

class Point
  attr_reader :x, :y

  def initialize(x, y)
    @x, @y = x, y
  end

  def ==(other)
    self.class == other.class &&
      self.x == other.x &&
      self.y == other.y
  end
  alias_method :eql?, :==
end

This will solve our immediate problem:

Point.new(1, 1) == Point.new(1, 1)
# => true

But, now we have exposed our value object’s internal state to the world in order to compare that object to another object of the same type.This is where protected methods come into play.

Declaring methods protected

We can use protected to expose our attribute readers to just other objects of the same type:

class Point
  attr_reader :x, :y
  protected :x, :y

  def initialize(x, y)
    @x, @y = x, y
  end

  def ==(other)
    self.class == other.class &&
      self.x == other.x &&
      self.y == other.y
  end
  alias_method :eql?, :==
end

Our custom comparison stil works, but you can no longer call the x and y methods from outside a Point object:

Point.new(1, 3).x
# => protected method `x' called for #<Point:0x007f7f82276678 @x=2, @y=2> (NoMethodError)

Ruby (since version 2) also reports that a Point object does not respond to the x method:

Point.new(1, 3).respond_to?(:x)
# => false

Admittedly, this use case isn’t all that common in your everyday code. But if Ruby supports it, it’s good to know for that one time you actually need it.