assign temporary value to an attribute

temp_attribute.rb

with_attribute(SomeModel, :record_timestamps).temporarily(false) do
  model_instance.update_attributes(:updated_at => 35.minutes.ago)
end

with_attribute(SomeModel, :record_timestamps, false) do
  model_instance.update_attributes(:updated_at => 35.minutes.ago)
end

SomeModel.with(:record_timestamps, false) do # with, with_temp, with_attr???
  model_instance.update_attributes(:updated_at => 35.minutes.ago)
end

# would be great if we could do something like this, but how??????
SomeModel.record_timestamps.temporarily(false) do
  model_instance.update_attributes(:updated_at => 35.minutes.ago)
end

My preference would be:

SomeModel.with(:record_timestamps => false) {}

But I'm not sure about polluting Object's namespace with with, so this might be the better option:

with(SomeModel, :record_timestamps => false) {}

Either of these would allow redefining multiple methods at once, which might come in handy on occasion.

I think with is a decent name -- other languages use it for the same thing.

So what we're doing here is really just stubbing out a method, but only within the block. If RSpec's Object#stub method didn't already take a block (to define the value of the stubbed method dynamically/lazily), then we could do this:

SomeModel.stub(:record_timestamps => false) { ... do something ... }

So maybe we should use a variant of stub:

SomeModel.stub(:record_timestamps => false).within { ... do something ... } # Just unstub the methods after running the within block?
SomeModel.stub_within_block(:record_timestamps => false) { ... do something ... }

NOTE: I just looked at the RSpec code, and it seems to support the hash syntax I'm using here, but it's not documented.