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ruby-on-railsrubynullmetaprogramming

Nils and method chaining

I'm just breaking into the ruby world and I could use a helping hand.

Suppose b is nil.

I'd like the following code to return nil instead of a "NoMethodError: undefined method"

a.b.c("d").e

The first thing I tried was to overload NilClass's missing_method to simply return a nil. This is the behaviour I want except I don't want to be this intrusive.

I'd love it if I could do something like this

SafeNils.a.b.c("d").e

So it's like a clean way to locally overload the NilClass's behaviour.

I'd love to hear some ideas or great resources for digging in on this. I'm also quite open to other approaches as long as it's fairly clean.

Thank you very much.

Solution

  • I think you can find a great solution in rails but that solution follows a different approach. Take a look at the try method. It's a clean approach.