This article targets Rails 2.3 Rails 3 The information contained in this page might not apply to different versions.

This is article is part of my series Understanding Ruby and Rails. Please see the table of contents for the series to view the list of all posts.

Last time I talked about the ActiveSupport Module#delegate method. Today, I want to introduce an other poweful ActiveSupport module: Rescuable , also known in the Rails ecosystem as rescue_from .

rescue_from and Rails

Starting from the release 2.0, Rails provides a clean way to rescue exceptions in a controller, mapping specific error classes to corresponding handlers.

Let's see an example. A call to ActiveRecord#find raises an ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound exception when the record passed as parameter doesn't exist. Assuming you want to display a nice 404 error page, you need to rescue the exception in each action where a find call is performed.

class PostsController < ApplicationController def show @post = Post . find ( params [ :id ]) rescue ActiveRecord :: RecordNotFound render_404 end def edit @post = Post . find ( params [ :id ]) rescue ActiveRecord :: RecordNotFound render_404 end def destroy @post = Post . find ( params [ :id ]) @post . destroy rescue ActiveRecord :: RecordNotFound render_404 end end class UserController < ApplicationController def show @user = User . find ( params [ :id ]) rescue ActiveRecord :: RecordNotFound render_404 end # ... end

As you can see, this approach leads to lot of code duplication if you count the number of find calls for each action per model. The rescue_from method is exactly the solution we are looking for. Instead of catching the exception at action-level, we instruct the controller to rescue all the ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound errors and forward the exception to the proper handler.

class ApplicationController < ActionController :: Base rescue_from ActiveRecord :: RecordNotFound , :with => :render_404 end class PostsController < ApplicationController def show @post = Post . find ( params [ :id ]) end def edit @post = Post . find ( params [ :id ]) end def destroy @post = Post . find ( params [ :id ]) @post . destroy end end class UserController < ApplicationController def show @user = User . find ( params [ :id ]) end # ... end

The rescue_from method also accepts a block or a Proc . And if you need, you can also selectively rescue exceptions according to the error message or other properties.

rescue_from and Ruby

The rescue_from was born as a Rails feature but because it's packaged in the ActiveSupport::Rescuable module, you can easily reuse it elsewhere in your code to take advantage of the same clean and concise exception handling mechanism.

All you have to do is to require ActiveSupport library and include the ActiveSupport::Rescuable module in your class. If you are in a Rails project, ActiveSupport is already loaded. Then, add a rescue block and use the rescue_with_handler method to filter any error raised by the application.

class MyClass include ActiveSupport :: Rescuable def method # ... rescue Exception => exception rescue_with_handler ( exception ) || raise end end

The following is a simplified example extracted from RoboDomain. The Queue::Jobs::Base is the base class for all DelayedJob jobs. Each child class implements the perform method, as requested by DelayedJob . However, the base class provides an internal method called execute which wraps all executions and rescues from some known errors to prevent DelayedJob to re-schedule the failed task.

class Queue :: Jobs :: Base include ActiveSupport :: Rescuable rescue_from ActiveRecord :: RecordNotFound , :with => :known_error protected def execute ( & block ) yield rescue Exception => exception rescue_with_handler ( exception ) || raise end def known_error ( exception ) @error = exception Rails . logger . error "[JOBS] Exception #{ exception . class } : #{ exception . message } " end end class Queue :: Jobs :: FetchWhois < Queue :: Jobs :: Base rescue_from Hostname :: NotLikeDomain , :with => :known_error # ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound already defined in parent class def initialize ( hostname_id ) @hostname_id = hostname_id end def perform execute do hostname = Hostname . find ( @hostname_id ) end end end

As you can see, using the ActiveSupport::Rescuable module I don't need to clutter my code with multiple begin / rescue / raise statements.

A word of warning