CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails
enRai
enRai

Reputation: 681

What is Rails Way? (readability vs drying)

I have a User model, which have voting methods. I want to write proxy methods for voting.

This is readable way:

def vote_up item
  return false unless can? :vote, item
  vote item, :up
end

def vote_down item
  return false unless can? :vote, item
  vote item, :down
end

And this is DRY way:

%w(up down).each do |vtype|
  define_method "vote_#{vtype}" do |item|
    return false unless can? :vote, item
    vote item, vtype.to_sym
  end
end

Which one is better and why?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 221

Answers (4)

Anil
Anil

Reputation: 3919

Neither(sorry).

def vote_count(item,vtype)
  return false unless can? :vote, item
  vote item, vtype
end

Good luck

Upvotes: 2

MrDanA
MrDanA

Reputation: 11647

Purely because OP seemed to like my comment, I'll put it as an answer:

Personally, considering you only have 2 methods here, and it's unlikely you'd ever add more (vote_sideways? vote_diagonally?) I would just go with the readable way. If you could potentially have many, many more though, I would go with the DRY way (because it becomes easily extendible) with a readable comment to explain to other developers (or to yourself later!).

Upvotes: 3

Dave Newton
Dave Newton

Reputation: 160261

Both.

I'm with Anil; just pass in a type--meta-programming this as a first-resort is yucky.

That said, I am a fan of convenience methods--but they should call the generic method with the type.

This keeps the generated method concise--the real work is done in the generic method, but the API user still gets the same convenience methods.

Upvotes: 0

thisfeller
thisfeller

Reputation: 798

IMHO, in this case, readability trumps dry. It scans quickly, and is easily grokked. Having said that, if you start adding vote types the second approach may be more flexible. YMMV.

Upvotes: 1

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