best practices in methods

[rodrigo coutinho]

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

[Jordon Bedwell]

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.

[Juan Pablo]

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.

--
--
Mis mejores deseos,
Best wishes,
Meilleurs vœux,

Juan Pablo
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.jpgenovese.com

[rodrigo coutinho]

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