Object#try is quite a commonly used method in Rails applications to cover cases where there is a possibility of dealing with a nil value or to provide flexible interface for handling cases where some kind of object doesn’t necessarily implement given method. Thanks to try , we may avoid getting NoMethodError . So it seems like it’s perfect, right? No NoMethodError exception, no problem?

Well, not really. There are some severe problems with using Object#try , and usually, it’s quite easy to implement a solution that would be much better.

Object#try - how does it work?

The idea behind Object#try is simple: instead of raising NoMethodError exception when calling some method on nil or calling a method on non- nil object that is not implemented by this object, it just returns nil .

Imagine that you want to grab the email of the first user. To make sure it won’t blow up when there are no users, you could write it the following way:

user . first . try ( :email )

What if you implemented some generic service where you can pass many types of objects and, e.g., after saving the object it attempts to send a notification if the object happens to implement a proper method for that? With Object#try it could be done like this:

class MyService def call ( object ) object . save! object . try ( :send_success_notification , "saved from MyService" ) end end

As you can see, it is also possible to provide arguments of the method.

What if you need to do some chaining of the methods where you can get nil at each intermediate step? No problem, you can use Object#try :

payment . client . try ( :addresses ). try ( :first ). try ( :country ). try ( :name )

What is the problem then?

Apparently, Object#try is capable of handling multiple cases, so what is the problem with using it?

Well, there are many. The biggest issue with Object#try is that in many cases it solves problems that should never happen in the first place and that problem is nil . The another one is that the intention of using it is not clear. What does the following code try to say?

payment . client . try ( :address )

Is it a legit case that some payment might not have a client and indeed it could be nil ? Or is added “just in case” if client happens to be nil to not blow up with NoMethodError exception? Or even worse, does client happen to be a polymorphic relationship where some models implement addresses method and the others don’t? Or maybe there is a problem with data integrity, and for a few payments the client was deleted for some reason, and it’s no longer there?

Just by looking at this code it is impossible to tell what’s the intention of Object#try , there are just too many possibilities.

Fortunately, there are plenty of alternative solutions that you can apply to get rid of Object#try and make your code clear and expressive - thanks to that, it will be much more maintainable, more readable and less prone to bugs as the intention will no longer be ambiguous.

Alternative solutions

Here are few “patterns” you could apply depending on the context where Object#try is used.

Respecting Law of Demeter

Law of Demeter is a handy rule (I wouldn’t go that far to call it a “law” though) which helps avoid structural coupling. What it states is that hypothetical object A should be only interested in its own immediate surrounding and should not be aware of the internal structure of its collaborators or associations. In many cases, it means having only one “dot” in method calls. However, Law of Demeter is not really about the amount of “dots” (method calls), it’s only about the coupling between objects, so chained operations and transformations are perfectly fine, e.g., the following example doesn’t violate the law:

input . to_s . strip . split ( " " ). map ( & :capitalize ). join ( " " )

but the following one does:

payment . client . address

Respecting Law of Demeter usually results in a clean and maintainable code, so unless you have a good reason to violate it, you should stick to the law and avoid tight coupling.

Let’s get back to the example with payment , client and address . How could we refactor the following code?

payment . client . try ( :address )

The first thing would be to reduce structural coupling and implement Payment#client_address method:

class Payment def client_address client . try ( :address ) end end

It’s much better now - instead of referring to the address via payment.client.try(:address) we can simply do payment.client_address , which is already an improvement as Object#try happens only in one place. Let’s refactor it further.

We are left now with two options: either client being nil is a legit case or not. If it is, we can make the code look confident and explicitly return early, which clearly shows that having no client is a valid use case:

class Payment def client_address return nil if client . nil? client . address end end

If it never happens to be nil , we can skip the guard statement:

class Payment def client_address client . address end end

Such delegations are pretty generic; maybe Rails has some nice solution to this problem? The answer is “yes”! ActiveSupport offers a very nice solution to the exact issue: ActiveSupport#delegate macro. Thanks to that macro, you can define delegations and even handle nil in the exact way we did it.

The first example, where nil is a legit use case, could be rewritten the following way:

class Payment delegate :address , to: :client , prefix: true , allow_nil: true end

and the second one, if nil is never to be expected:

class Payment delegate :address , to: :client , prefix: true end

Much cleaner, less coupled and we’ve managed to achieve the final result of not using Object#try , but just in a much more elegant way.

However, it is still possible that we might not expect payment to have an empty client (e.g. payment for the transaction that is not completed yet) in some cases, e.g., when displaying data for the payments with completed transactions, but somehow we are getting dreaded NoMethodEror exception. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to add allow_nil: true option in delegate macro and for sure it doesn’t mean that we should use Object#try . The solution here would be:

Operating on the scoped data

If we want to deal payments with completed transactions, which are guaranteed to have client , why not simply make sure that we are dealing with the right set of data? In Rails apps that would probably mean applying some ActiveRecord scope to Payment s collection, like with_completed_transactions :

Payment . with_completed_transactions . find_each do | payment | do_something_with_address ( payment . client_address ) end

Since we never plan to do anything with client’s address for payments for not completed transactions, we don’t need to explicitly handle nil s here.

Nevertheless, even if client were always required for creating a payment, it would still be possible that such code might result in NoMethodError . One example where that might happen would be a deleted by mistake associated client record. In that case, we would need to fix:

Data integrity

Ensuring data integrity, especially with RDBMS like PostgreSQL, is quite simple - we just need to remember about adding the right constraints when creating new tables. Keep in mind that this needs to be handled on a database level, validations in models are never enough as they can easily be bypassed. To avoid the issue where client turns out to be nil , despite presence validation, we should add NOT NULL and FOREIGN KEY constraints when creating payments table, which will prevent us from not having a client assigned at all and also deleting the client record if it’s still associated with some payment:

create_table :payments do | t | t . references :client , index: true , foreign_key: true , null: false end

And that’s it! By remembering about those constraints, you can avoid a lot of unexpected use cases with nil s.

Ensuring types via explicit conversion

I saw few times Object#try used in a quite exotic way which looked similar to this:

params [ :name ]. try ( :upcase )

Well, this code clearly shows that some string is expected to be found under name key in params , so why not just ensure it is a string by applying explicit conversion using to_s method?

params [ :name ]. to_s . upcase

Much cleaner that way!

However, those two codes are not equivalent. The former one returns a string if params[:name] is a string, but if it is nil , it will return nil . The latter always returns a string. It is not entirely clear if nil is expected in such case (which is the obvious problem with Object#try ), so we are left with two options:

nil is the expected return value if params[:name] is nil - might not be the best idea as dealing with nils instead of strings might be quite inconvenient, however, in some cases, it might be necessary to have nil s. If that’s the case, we can make it clear that we expect params[:name] to be nil by adding a guard statement:

return if params [ :name ]. nil? params [ :name ]. to_s . upcase

a string is the expected return type - we don’t need to bother with guard statements, and we can just keep the explicit conversion:

params [ :name ]. to_s . upcase

In more complex scenarios, it might be a better idea to use form objects and/or have a more robust types management, e.g. by using dry-types, but the idea would still be the same as for explicit conversions, it would just be better as far as the design goes.

Using right methods

Dealing with nested hashes is quite a common use case, especially when building APIs and dealing with user-provided payload. Imagine you are dealing with JSONAPI-compliant API and want to grab client’s name when updating. The expected payload might look like this:

{ data: { id: 1 , type: "clients" , attributes: { name: "some name" } } }

However, since we never know if the API consumer provided a proper payload or not, it would make sense to assume that the structure won’t be right.

One terrible way to handle it would be using… guess what? Obviously Object#try :

params [ :data ]. try ( :[] , :attributes ). try ( :[] , :name )

It’s certainly hard to say that this code looks pleasant. And the funny thing is that it is really easy to rewrite cleanly.

One solution would be applying explicit conversions on each intermediate step:

params [ :data ]. to_h [ :attributes ]. to_h [ :name ]

That’s better, but not really expressive. Ideally, we would use some dedicated method. One of those potentially dedicated methods is Hash#fetch which allows you to provide a value that should be returned if the given key is not present in the hash:

params . fetch ( :data ). fetch ( :attributes , {}). fetch ( :name )

It looks even better but would be nice to have something even more dedicated for digging through nested hashes. Fortunately, since Ruby 2.3.0, we can take advantage of Hash#dig , which was implemented for exactly this purpose - digging through nested hashes and not raising exceptions if some intermediate key turns out to not be there:

params . dig ( :data , :attributes , :name )

Having Proper interfaces / Duck typing

Let’s get back to the example that was mentioned in the beginning with sending a potential notification:

class MyService def call ( object ) object . save! object . try ( :send_success_notification , "saved from MyService" ) end end

There are two possible solutions here:

Implementing two set of services - one that sends notifications and one that doesn’t:

class MyServiceA def call ( object ) object . save! end end class MyServiceB def call ( object ) object . save! object . send_success_notification ( "saved from MyService" ) end end

Thanks to this refactoring, the code is much cleaner, and we easily got rid of Object#try . However, now we need to know that for one type of objects we need to use MyServiceA and for another type MyServiceB . It might make sense, but might also be a problem. In such case the 2nd option would be better:

Duck typing. Simply add send_success_notification method to all objects that are passed to MyService and if it’s supposed to do nothing, just leave the method body empty:

class MyService def call ( object ) object . save! object . send_success_notification ( "saved from MyService" ) end end

The extra benefit of this option is that it helps to identify some common behaviors of the objects and to make them explicit. As you can see, in case of Object#try a lot of domain concepts might stay implicit and unclear. It doesn’t mean they are not there; they are just not clearly identified. This is yet another important thing to keep in mind - Object#try also hurts your domain.

Null Object Pattern

Let’s reuse the example above with sending notifications after persisting some models and do a little modification - we will make mailer an argument of the method and call send_success_notification on it:

class MyService def call ( object , mailer: SomeMailer ) object . save! mailer . send_success_notification ( object , "saved from MyService" ) end end

That’s going to work great if we always want to send a notification. What if we don’t want to do it? One terrible way to handle it would be passing nil as a mailer and take advantage of Object#try :

class MyService def call ( object , mailer: SomeMailer ) object . save! mailer . try ( :send_success_notification , object , "saved from MyService" ) end end Service . new . call ( object , mailer: nil )

But you’ve probably already guessed this solution is a no-go. Fortunately, we can apply Null Object Pattern and pass an instance of some NullMailer which implements send_success_notification method that simply does nothing:

class NullMailer def send_success_notification ( * ) end end class MyService def call ( object , mailer: SomeMailer ) object . save! mailer . send_success_notification ( object , "saved from MyService" ) end end MyService . new . call ( object , mailer: NullMailer . new )

That’s certainly better than using Object#try .

What about &. a.k.a. lonely/safe navigation operator?

&. , lonely/safe navigation operator is a pretty new thing introduced in Ruby 2.3.0. It’s quite similar to Object#try , but it’s less ambiguous - if you call a method on the object different than nil , and this method is not implemented by that object, NoMethodError will still be raised which is not the case for Object#try . Check the following examples:

User . first . try ( :unknown_method ) # assuming `user` is nil => nil User . first & . unknown_method => nil User . first . try ( :unknown_method! ) # assuming `user` is not nil => nil User . first & . unknown_method => NoMethodError : undefined method `unknown_method' for #<User:0x007fb10c0fd498>

Does it mean safe navigation operator is fine and safe to use? Not really. It still comes with the same problems as Object#try does, it’s merely one serious issue less.

Nevertheless, I think there is a case where the lonely operator is not that bad. Check the following example:

Comment . create! ( content: content , author: current_user , group_id: current_user & . group_id )

What we want to do is create a comment belonging to some current_user who might be an author and also assign a group_id from current_user , who might be nil.

The same code could be written as:

Comment . create! ( content: content , author: current_user ) do | c | c . group_id = current_user & . group_id if current_user end

or maybe as:

comment_params = { content: content , author: current_user , } comment_params [ :group_id ] = current_user . group_id if current_user Comment . create! ( comment_params )

But I think neither of those alternatives is more readable than the first example with &. operator, so might be worth trading a bit of clarity for more readability.

Wrapping Up

I believe there is not a single valid use case for Object#try due to the ambiguity of its intentions, negative impact on the domain model and simply for the fact that there are many other ways to solve the problems that Object#try “solves” in a clumsy way - starting from respecting Law of Demeter and delegations, through operating on properly scoped data, applying right database constraints, ensuring types using explicit conversions, using proper methods, having right interfaces, taking advantage of duck typing, ending with Null Object Pattern or even using the safe navigation operator ( &. ) which is much safer to use and might be applied in limited cases.

Source: https://www.pbnsg.org/weight-management/2015/7/27/do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try-yoda