Service Objects

info

We’re currently making rapid changes to the product so our docs may be out of date. If you need help, please email yo@forem.com.

What are Service Objects

Service objects are Plain Old Ruby Objects (POROs) which encapsulate a whole business process/user interaction.

Our services are located in app/services with the corresponding specs in spec/services. Their main interface is a class level method named call, as in the following example:

class ImportUsers
  def self.call(arg1)
    new(arg1).call
  end

  def initialize(arg1)
    @arg1 = arg1
  end

  def call
    # import code goes here
  end
end

To distinguish services from models we often give them verb names vs noun names, e.g. ImportUsers instead of UserImporter.

Generating Service Objects

To make our services more consistent we use a custom Rails generator. Some usage examples:

Generate a non-namespaced service without arguments

$ rails generate service DoTheThing

# app/services/do_the_thing.rb
class DoTheThing
  def self.call
    new.call
  end

  def call
  end
end

# spec/services/do_the_thing_spec.rb
require "rails_helper"

RSpec.describe DoTheThing, type: :service do
  pending "add some examples to (or delete) #{__FILE__}"
end

Generate a non-namespaced service with arguments:

$ rails generate service DoTheThing arg1 arg2

# app/services/do_the_thing.rb
class DoTheThing
  def self.call(arg1, arg2)
    new(arg1, arg2).call
  end

  def initialize(arg1, arg2)
    @arg1 = arg1
    @arg2 = arg2
  end

  def call
  end
end

The generated spec is the same as above.

Generate a namespaced service with arguments

$ rails generate service things/dothem arg1 arg2

# app/services/things/do_them.rb
class Things::DoThem
  def self.call(arg1, arg2)
    new(arg1, arg2).call
  end

  def initialize(arg1, arg2)
    @arg1 = arg1
    @arg2 = arg2
  end

  def call
  end
end

# spec/services/things/do_them_spec.rb
require "rails_helper"

RSpec.describe Things::DoThem, type: :service do
  pending "add some examples to (or delete) #{__FILE__}"
end