I learned very quickly while working on a large open source project is that it is important to make my code hard to break. The primary line of defense for this is a comprehensive test suite, but I think it’s also very important to create functions that are easy to use and difficult to damage.

I find I even code this way on personal projects that will never be released. Even if you never work on a team with other developers, there is a good chance you will forget a lot of implementation details of the code that you aren’t actively working on. You need to protect your code from yourself!

I think a lot about state these days. How much data should an object have, and how should it expose that to other objects? I find many bugs are related to the state and scope of data not being what you’d expect.

An Example: ActiveRecord

ActiveRecord makes it easy to retrieve all rows from database and represent them as objects:

Product . all . each do | p | puts p . name end

We didn’t have to specify that we wanted the name column from the database before we outputted it; by default ActiveRecord includes all the columns in the table.

Over time, many frequently used tables in databases such as Product tend to get more columns added to them to support new features. You might find that your table that started off with 4 columns is eventually over 50!

There is overhead involved in returning all those extra columns from the database. At the very least, the database has to send more data across the wire to your application. On top of that, Rails has to deserialize all the columns into their appropriate types in the object.

When returning a single Product you will probably not notice much of a difference. However, when returning hundreds of rows at once, the overhead can add up quite a bit.

Selecting only what you need

ActiveRecord provides a method called select that can be used choose the columns returned from the database. We could write something like this:

Product . select ([ :id , :name ]). each do | p | puts p . name end

This will certainly execute faster than the Products.all query above. However, if you do this, you are exposing yourself to many bugs due to inconsistent state.

The danger here is ActiveRecord returns a mixed state instance of Product . The returned object looks like a Product . It has all of the instance methods you defined on Product , however, it is missing some of the data that is normally there.

To illustrate this, imagine you have a function that returns a product’s name, but adds an asterisk if it’s on sale:

def fancy_product_title ( product ) if product . on_sale? return product . name + "*" else return product . name end end

In this case, our method checks the on_sale column in the database to determine whether to append the asterisk. However, if you retrieved the Product using select([:id, :name]) you would not have this column present, and even if the product was on sale your users wouldn’t know about it.

Now this might seem like a pretty easy bug to squash. Any competant programmer could adjust this code to return on_sale in the select clause if if they saw it wasn’t ever being displayed.

That is demanding a much broader knowledge of the application and the flow of data than is necessary. It takes more development time, and doesn’t scale well when your codebase grows. Also, who wants to constantly think “hey, do I have all the data I need in this object to do my work?”

Keep it Consistent

You can eliminate any entire class of bugs by never using select . You should insist that your object instances always include all their data members.

What about the performance issues? I suggest instead that you design your data structures in a different way. Rather than returning inconsistent Product models, why not create a method that returns BasicProduct objects?

All Product instances have enough data to transform into BasicProduct instances if they need to. If you like inheritance you could make a Product extend a BasicProduct . If you’re not a fan of inheritance you could create a to_basic method.

This is just one example of how easy it is to leave things in an inconsistent state, especially when considering performance. I suggest that you make an effort to keep your data in sync as much as possible, even if it involves a little data modelling. You’ll have fewer bugs, and your code will be better to use in the long run.