How to call a Thor task multiple times?

Question

Thor like Rake (and Make) has task management. If I call a task multiple times, it will effectively call the task only once. How can I call a task multiple times?

I tried modifying the @_invocations hash, but that did not work:

require 'csv'
require './config/environment'

class MisReport < Thor

  desc "all", "generate mysql and postgres mis"
  def all
    generate("pg_mis_report", "pg")
    generate("mysql_mis_report", "mysql") 
  end

  desc "generate", "generate mis report"
  def generate(file_name = "mis_report_#{Time.now.to_s(:number)}", connection = "postgres") 
    if connection == "pg"
      puts "== postgres database"
      ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection :development_mysql
    else
      puts "== mysql database"
      ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection :development
    end

    # generate MIS

    puts
    puts "mis file is at: #{file_path}"
  end

end

Answer 1

Looking through the Thor docs I couldn't find a way to force invokation of the same task multiple times. This is probably by design.

I've created a workaround that will do what you ask by combining the report generation requests into a single task which in turn relies on a the "no_task" block Thor makes available for non-task methods. You have the flexibility to add new reports to be generated by adding them to the hash argument passed to generate.

class MisReport < Thor

  desc "all", "generate mysql and postgres mis"
  def all
    generate({:pg_mis_report => "pg", :mysql_mis_report => "mysql"})
  end

  desc "generate", "generate mis report"
  def generate(hash)
    hash.each_pair {|file_name, connection| generate_report(file_name.to_s, connection)}
  end

  no_tasks{
    def generate_report(file_name = "mis_report_#{Time.now.to_s(:number)}", connection = "postgres") 

      if connection == "pg"
        puts "== postgres database"
        #ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection :development_mysql
      else
        puts "== mysql database"
        #ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection :development
      end

      # generate MIS

      file_path = "/some/path/to/#{file_name}"
      puts
      puts "mis file is at: #{file_path}"
    end
  }

end

I've tested it and output is shown here:

$> thor mis_report:all
== postgres database

mis file is at: /some/path/to/pg_mis_report
== mysql database

mis file is at: /some/path/to/mysql_mis_report

Hope this helps.