Best service objects until now

Service objects was a big thing a couple years ago in Rails community, like everyone just learned about the single responsibility principle. In any case, personally I couldn’t find a Service Object pattern that I was happy with, neither from my brain nor from the Internetzz. Lately I have been using something that I can say it’s good enough. I call it PerformerService, meaning that it’s for service objects that should have a simple method, called perform. First I define and include the following module in any Service Object I need it to behave as a PerformerService.

module PerformerService
  def self.included(base)
    base.send(:define_singleton_method, :perform) do |*args|
      return self.send(:new, *args).send(:perform)
    end
  end

  class Failure
    attr_reader :errors, :meta

    def initialize(errors = [], meta = {})
      @errors = [errors].flatten
      @meta = meta.is_a?(Hash) ? OpenStruct.new(meta) : meta
    end

    def success?
      false
    end
    alias_method :valid?, :success?

    def method_missing(meth, *args)
      if meta.respond_to?(meth)
        self.data.send(meth, *args)
      elsif meta.is_a?(Hash) && meta.key?(meth) && args.length == 0
        self.data.send(:[], meth)
      else
        super
      end
    end
  end

  F = Failure

  class Success
    attr_reader :data

    def initialize(data = {})
      @data = data.is_a?(Hash) ? OpenStruct.new(data) : data
    end

    def success?
      true
    end

    alias_method :valid?, :success?

    def value
      data
    end

    def method_missing(meth, *args)
      if data.respond_to?(meth)
        self.data.send(meth, *args)
      elsif data.is_a?(Hash) && data.key?(meth) && args.length == 0
        self.data.send(:[], meth)
      else
        super
      end
    end
  end

  S = Success
end

The module does 3 important things:

First it defines a class method called perform so that you can call the Service Object as ServiceObject.perform
Secondly it treats the object’s initialize method as private, which means that we should mark the method as private in our Service Object class definition (as seen below) to avoid calling the object in a different way other than the perform class method
Third it defines a Success and Failure classes that have some nice interfaces, as we will she below.

Now in order to create a Service Object all we have to do is to include the module and mark everything else as private methods.

class UserAuthenticationService
  include PerformerService

  private
    attr_reader :username, :password

    def initialize(username, password)
      @username, @password = username, password
    end

    def perform
      begin
        resp = external_api_user
        return S.new({user: resp[:user]})
      rescue ExternalApi::AuthenticationError => msg
        F.new(msg, status: 401)
      end
    end

    def external_api_user
      ExternalApi::User.do_stuff(token)
    end
end

class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  def create
    result = UserAuthenticationService.perform(params[:username], params[:password])

    if result.success?
      @current_user = result.user
      head :created
    else
      render(json: {errors: result.errors}, status: result.status)
    end
  end
end

Note: I add the method_missing because I like to use result.method instead of result.meta.method (in case of Failure) or result.data.method (in case of Success).

It’s a matter of personal taste and you can remove it if you don’t like it, the PerformerService will still be the best Servic Object pattern out there, I think :)