Open struct for dynamic objects in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Open Struct for Dynamic Objects

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple program to store information about a book using a flexible object. This object should allow you to add new details easily without changing the class structure.

🎯 Goal: Create a dynamic object using OpenStruct to store book details, add a new attribute, and print the final information.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use Ruby's OpenStruct to create a dynamic object

Add initial attributes for title and author

Add a new attribute year after creation

Print the complete book information

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

OpenStruct is useful when you want to create objects that can change shape easily, like storing user settings or data from APIs without defining a full class.

💼 Career

Many Ruby developers use OpenStruct for quick prototyping and flexible data handling, especially in web development and scripting tasks.

1

Create an OpenStruct object with initial book details

Write code to require the ostruct library and create an OpenStruct object called book with title set to "The Ruby Way" and author set to "Hal Fulton".

Ruby

# Require ostruct and create book with title and author
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use require 'ostruct' to load the library. Then create book with OpenStruct.new and pass a hash with keys :title and :author.

2

Add a new attribute for the publication year

Add a new attribute called year to the existing book object and set it to 2020.

Ruby

require 'ostruct'
book = OpenStruct.new(title: "The Ruby Way", author: "Hal Fulton")
# Add year attribute to book
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use dot notation to add year to book like book.year = 2020.

3

Access and print the book's title and year

Write code to print the book's title and year using puts and string interpolation with book.title and book.year.

Ruby

require 'ostruct'
book = OpenStruct.new(title: "The Ruby Way", author: "Hal Fulton")
book.year = 2020
# Print title and year
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use puts with double quotes and #{} to insert book.title and book.year into the string.

4

Print the complete book object

Write code to print the entire book object using puts book.

Ruby

require 'ostruct'
book = OpenStruct.new(title: "The Ruby Way", author: "Hal Fulton")
book.year = 2020
puts "Title: #{book.title}"
puts "Year: #{book.year}"
# Print the whole book object
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Simply use puts book to print all attributes of the OpenStruct object.