Hello,
Consider this code, it gets a mention and an array of tags.
It finds the mentions and add the tags.
But in my methods I keep using return if foo.nil?
or execute a line of code if a line is not nil.
Is there a better way of doing this kind of thing?
Thks
def add_tags_to_mention mention_id, *tags
mention = Mention.find mention_id
return if mention.nil?
tags.each do |tag_id|
tag = Tag.find tag_id
mention.tags.push(tag.to_mongo) if tag
end
end
Personally I would handle that a bit differently in that I would have the model handle building it's own tags and I would inject an array and then delete_if value blank? but to address your concern directly:
I would never return nil unless I have to. I know quite a few Ruby programmers do not care about that situation but I always return false, true or the value of the value I processed... there are a lot of cases where I will also to opt to just raise but that really depends... in your situation I would have built it on the model as Mention.build_and_save_tags and then had it raise if it could not find the mention because to me that makes the most sense. What I am saying is to me `return false if mention.blank?` makes more sense to me. I could go on a long explanation a mile long explaining the difference between situations and why I chose my flow to work those ways but I'll just leave it at I would prefer false before nil.
Returning nil is a little bit ambiguous. Did the method finished correctly or a condition wasn't met? I always try to return something or throw an exception when needed.
I don't know if there's a "best practice" for that.
Alright, based on your opinion of returning nil,I changed the method a little bit. In fact return false is better.
Thank you.
class Mention
def self.build_and_save_tags mention_id, *tags
mention = Mention.find mention_id
return false if mention.blank?
tags.each do |tag_id|
tag = Tag.find tag_id
if tag
mention.tags.push(tag.to_mongo)
mention.save
end
end
end
end