[Proposal] Adding literal_properties Instance Method

[omarluq]

Idea

Add a simple literal_properties instance method that returns a Literal::Hash containing all defined properties and their current values. This makes it easy to get a snapshot of an object's current state in a type-safe way.

Example

class Person
  extend Literal::Properties

  prop :first_name, String, default: -> { "John" }
  prop :last_name, String, default: "Doe".freeze
  prop :age, Integer
end

person = Person.new(age: 30)
person.literal_properties
# => { first_name: "John", last_name: "Doe", age: 30 }

[joeldrapper]

You do get a to_h method when using Literal::Struct or Literal::Data. I don’t think Literal::Properties can assume to know how to build your to_h method, but I like the idea of exposing the literal properties via a specific method like this.

[omarluq]

Interesting, I didn't think about using plain old to_h. My intuition went toward wanting to call a literal method, but I did test it and it seems to work. Here's what I found:

[kucho]

+1. I just introduced Literal to our main application and was wondering if we could have a prop_list. The main use case is we use extensively service objects and need to slice the data for creating records.

My workaround so far was inheriting from Literal::Struct and use to_h.slice(...) inside the object, but I feel that's no very intuitive.

Ideally, I would like to inherit from Literal::Object and use props, prop_list or prop_values.

What do you think @joeldrapper?

[ibrahima]

Ahh, I would love to have this as well. I actually thought this was available from

literal/lib/literal/properties.rb

Line 61 in dca4714

def literal_properties

but it looks like that's not the case.

My use case is for Phlex components to be able to easily log their properties in development, similar to how React dev tools let you see the props of a React component. to_h would also work for this, so maybe that's sufficient for now.