super in Ruby

When developing programs on an object-oriented architecture, we must deal with many methods and classes. Sometimes we need to override or get the definition of a method already in a parent class.

In Ruby, it is easy to get the definition of a method in the parent class through the keyword super.

In this article, we will see the use of the super keyword in Ruby and look at an example to make the topic easier.

Use super in Ruby

In the example below, we will illustrate the use of the super keyword in Ruby. Let’s discuss the code below.

class ParentClass
  def myMethod
    puts 'This is from the parent class.'
  end
end

class ChildClass < ParentClass
  def myMethod
    super
  end
end

child = ChildClass.new
child.myMethod

In the above example, we have a ParentClass with a method myMethod. There is a ChildClass that is the child class of ParentClass with the same method, myMethod.

Now, inside the method definition, we used the super keyword to extract the definition of myMethod from the parent class.

After that, we create an object of the ChildClass and call the method myMethod through these lines:

child = ChildClass.new
child.myMethod

After running the above code example, you will get the output below.

This is from the parent class.

You need to know a few things when working with the super keyword. The keyword super can only be used inside a method, and the result it returns is from the parent method. Also, the child class should be inherited from the parent class.