Add or_if_blank to Object

I'm not sure if its good idea, because there's a significant difference with '||'. Usual 'or' is short-circuiting, while this method cannot work that way.

I think that this should at least be noted in the documentation of this method, so that people don't try things like '.or_if_blank? raise', or '.or_if_blank? <do_something_else_expensive>'

And BTW some time ago my co-worked showed me some blog post where some dude proposed '|' for same operation. You might want to consider this syntax, although I think that will be worse, because of the above mentioned non-short-circuiting behavior.

The only way I could see to get short-circuit behavior would be to pass a block; it would look kind of weird:

object.param.or_if_blank { object.other_param }

Just a thought.

Had a thought just after posting - it wouldn't be as generic as the above, but what about an operator like or ?

So the above would be:

object.param._or_.other_param

There'd be some interesting trickery needed (see the implementation of SafeNil for ideas), but it would be pretty clear. Of course, I'm a little biased as I've gotten spoiled by hobosupport's _? operator (equivalent to try).

I was going to suggest the block as an option. It's easy to do:

def or_if_blank(other=nil) self.blank? ? (other || yield) : self end

Then you can call it with either an immediate value or a block to get the value with a deferred computation.

person.nickname.or_if_blank(person.full_name)

person.nickname.or_if_blank { person.full_name }

I really like the idea of adding lazy evaluation by passing a block. A little note in the docs can point out the difference between "? :" and or_if_blank.

Interesting.

But I like my BumbleBee approach, which is inline with how :try is implemented

person.try(:nickname) || person.full_name # if you care about a :nil? nickname
person.bumblebee(:nickname, :full_name) # if you care about a :blank? nickname

or with fuller defaulting

person.bumblebee(:nickname, :full_name) || "unknown"

My full gist on the matter is here; http://gist.github.com/54501

(notably the bumblebee doesn't know anything about args or blocks, which :try does)

The bumblebee is kind of cool. Still it does not cover slightly more complex cases:

person.hometown.or_if_blank { person.address.town }

Silly example. You get the idea.

Yeah I really like the block idea. Patch updated.

try() doesn't help with blank strings, which was the whole point of what I was suggesting.

And out of curiosity, what's the relevance of try()'s usage in views? I use my own version of or_if_blank in models, controllers, and helpers just as much as in views.

If this functionality is not wanted - for whatever reason - I'd consider packaging it up as a gem. Still I have to agree that I do not see how try could be of any help in this use case.