CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubymethodsnaming-conventions
Dennis
Dennis

Reputation: 2221

ruby / rails boolean method naming conventions

I have a short question on ruby / rails method naming conventions or good practice. Consider the following methods:

# some methods performing some sort of 'action'
def action; end
def action!; end

# some methods checking if performing 'action' is permitted
def action?; end
def can_action?; end
def action_allowed?; end

So I wonder, which of the three ampersand-methods would be the "best" way to ask for permissions. I would go with the first one somehow, but in some cases I think this might be confused with meaning has_performed_action?. So the second approach might make that clearer but is also a bit more verbose. The third one is actually just for completeness. I don't really like that one.

So are there any commonly agreed-on good practices for that?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 5827

Answers (4)

SFEley
SFEley

Reputation: 7786

I'd go up one level and rethink the original method names. If the methods perform an action, then the role they play is that of a verb, not a noun:

# some methods performing some sort of 'action'
def act
def act!

This has the handy side effect of a more natural-sounding answer to your question:

# method checking if 'action' is permitted
def can_act?

...as well as some other obvious variants:

# methods checking if 'action' was performed
def acted?
def did_act?

# method checking if 'action' is called for by other circumstances
def should_act?

# method putting 'action' into a work queue
def act_later(delay_seconds=0)

Et cetera.

Upvotes: 0

OscarRyz
OscarRyz

Reputation: 199334

def can_action?; end

Upvotes: 0

Pan Thomakos
Pan Thomakos

Reputation: 34350

I think that depends on the action you want to perform and the action you are checking for. I would aim for readability and least amount of confusion:

self.run
self.can_run? # can this object run?
self.running_allowed? # is running allowed here or by this user?

self.redeem!
self.redeemable? # is this object currently redeemable?

self.copy_to_clipboard
self.copy_to_dashboard
self.copyable? or self.can_be_copied? #can this object be copied
self.copy_allowed?(:clipboard) # is copying to the clipboard allowed by me?

Upvotes: 6

Chris Heald
Chris Heald

Reputation: 62688

I wouldn't use action?, because typically, single-word question-mark methods are used to indicate the presence (or absence) of a value. Rails lets you write English-like code, so pick a method name that makes the code the most readable.

perform_action!("update") if action_allowed?("update")

Seems perfectly readable to me.

Upvotes: 2

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