ruby-on-railsrubyservice-object

Rails ApplicationService for Service Objects has both execute and call. Why?

I've inherited an app that uses a lot of Service Objects, which inherit from ApplicationService:

class ApplicationService
  class InternalServiceError < StandardError; end

  include ActiveModel::Model

  def self.execute(*args)
    new(*args).execute
  end

  def self.call(...)
    new(...).call
  end
end

Why would there be both an execute and a call method? It seems odd to have both since they are both instantiating an instance of the class.

Also, what is (...) for? I've not seen that argument style before. How is it different to (*args) or (**args)?

Solution

  • I found some internal docs that revealed that execute is legacy and with advent of Ruby 2.7 it was decided to replace it with call, but nobody has updated the base class to remove execute.

    Thanks to @Stefan for the link to explain call forwarding syntax (...)