Any way to determine which object called a method?

Question

I\'m hoping that Ruby\'s message-passing infrastructure means there might be some clever trick for this.

How do I determine the calling object -- which object called

Answer 1

Peter's answer used in production code example

In my company we were deprecating deleted flag in flavor of Paranoia gem deleted_at column. The code bellow is how we were ensuring all will go well before we remove column (deploying this code and then after 2 or 3 days of being live we deploy migration remoove_column :lessons, :deleted

class Lesson < ActiveRecord::Base

  def deleted
    if caller.select { |c| c.match /serialization\.rb/ }.any?
      # this is Rails object mapping
      !!deleted_at
    else
      raise 'deplicated - deleted was replaced by  deleted_at'
    end
  end
end