How would one go about keeping track of a classes objects by pushing the new instances to an Array, and to allow this array to be edited/popped by an object of another class.
For example;
The object 'airplane' (Plane class) is created, and pushed to an Array called 'in-flight'.
The object 'airport' (Airport class) asks it to land and pops from the array.
Is there a way to do so, with and/or without the use of class variables?
You could do this by overriding the initialize method of the Airplane class. Something like this:
class Airplane
class << self
attr_accessor :in_flight
end
self.in_flight ||= []
def initialize(*)
self.class.in_flight << self
super
end
def land!
self.class.in_flight.delete(self)
end
end
then, from anywhere else in your codebase, do something like this:
# We'll just pick a random airplane from the list of those in
# flight, but presumably you would have some sort of logic around
# it (already have an Airplane instance somehow, select one from
# the array according to some criteria, etc).
airplane = Airplane.in_flight.sample
airplane.land!
Not sure that this is the greatest application design in the world, but it will certainly do if your needs are simple.
.new. This factory method, beside creation of objects, can also register them in some array or whatever