Chapter 7 Access Control
Ruby allows you to modify an object’s state by calling one of its methods. Once you can control access to the methods, you can have controlled access to the object as well.
Ruby provides you with three levels of protection:
- Public methods – This type of methods can be called by anyone. An example of this type is the class’ instance methods.
- Protected methods – Only objects of the defining class and its subclasses can invoke this type of method.
- Private methods – This type of method cannot be called by any other receiver. The receiver will always be
self.
Example:
class AccessControl
def AC1
end
protected
def AC2
end
private
def AC3
end
end
ACCL = AccessControl.new
ACCL.AC1
ACCL.AC2
ACCL.AC3