Those of you using Chris Wanstrath’s slick little try trick will now have access to that functionality in Rails with this ActiveSupport update.

Basically, try lets you attempt to invoke a method on an object without worrying about a NoMethodError being raised. If the method doesn’t exist, or if the target object nil, then nil will be returned without exceptions:

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# No exceptions when receiver is nil
nil.try(:destroy) #=> nil

# Useful when chaining potential nil items
User.admins.first.try(:address).try(:reset)

Just a small little bit of syntactical candy pulled in from the community.

Update: You can now also use this trick for methods with arguments

tags: ruby,
rubyonrails