Is there a more rubylike way of doing this helper function - ruby-on-rails

Question

def work_location(application)
if application.contact.work_location.blank? rescue nil
return false
else
return true
end
return false
end
Basically i want to return true or false ....I only want to return true if the work_location is not blank and i need to catch the nil error
Actually this produces a syntax error
syntax error, unexpected modifier_rescue, expecting keyword_then or ';' or '\n'
..._location.blank? rescue nil

Answer 1

def work_location(application)
application.try(:contact).try(:work_location).present?
end
Personally I dislike handling potential nils by doing rescue false because you catch far more than nils: such a rescue rescues all sorts of other errors, for example it will catch NoMethodError, so if you'd typed one of the method names it would squash that error and make it much harder to track down.

Answer 2

Write tests and check both true and false return cases
Shorten code above with:
def work_location(application)
application.contact.work_location.blank? rescue true
end

Answer 3

As far as I can tell, you are creating a helper method here.
I should define a method on application, which you can then use in your views.
The advantage: it is purely object-oriented. An application should know if it has a workplace or not.
Secondly, use try: it will only attempt the given method or block if the receiver is not nil, else it returns nil.
So :
class Application
def has_work_location?
self.contact.try { |c| c.work_location.present? }
end
end
Note that this usage of try only works in rails 3.2, if you are on an older version it does not accept a block. Furthermore nil.present? works and returns falso, so you could write
def has_work_location?
self.contact.try(:work_location).present?
end
Note: because we are adding a method to application, we can safely assume application, so we only need to check that the contact exists anymore.
In your views you can then just write:
<%= #application.contact.workplace if #application.has_work_place? %>
or something similar. Hope this helps.