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On my current project, we noticed common pattern when dealing with nil. We would often check an object to see if it was nil before calling a method on that object:

name = person ? person.name : nil

To reduce duplication, Patrick Farley and Ali Aghareza created a nil_or method which handles this. The above code becomes:

name = person.nil_or.name

The nil_or causes the expression to return nil if the target is nil. If not, the name method is called.

The code for nil_or looks like:

module ObjectExtension
  def nil_or
    return self unless self.nil?
    Class.new do
      def method_missing(sym, *args); nil; end
    end.new
  end  
end

class Object
  include ObjectExtension
end

The nil_or method returns self if self is not nil. If self is nil, it creates a new Object which eats all method calls and returns nil.

We use a fair amount of delegation on this project using forwardable, so we created a delegator which has the same effect. For example, you can replace this delegation:

class Person
  extend Forwardable
  def_delegator :@job, :title, :job_title
end

with this one:

class Person
  extend Forwardable
  def_delegator_or_nil :@job, :title, :job_title
end

This delegation is equivalent to this code:

class Person
  def job_title
    @job ? @job.title : nil
  end
end

The code for def_delegator_or_nil looks like:

module ForwardableExtension
  def def_delegator_or_nil(accessor, method, new_method = method)
    accessor = accessor.id2name if accessor.kind_of?(Integer)
    method = method.id2name if method.kind_of?(Integer)
    new_method = new_method.id2name if new_method.kind_of?(Integer)

    module_eval(<<-EOS, "(__FORWARDABLE_EXTENSION__)", 1)
      def #{new_method}(*args, &block)
        begin
          if #{accessor}.nil?
            nil
          else
            #{accessor}.__send__(:#{method}, *args,&block)
          end
        rescue Exception
          $@.delete_if{|s| /^\\(__FORWARDABLE_EXTENSION__\\):/ =~ s} unless Forwardable::debug
          Kernel::raise
        end
      end
    EOS
  end
end

module Forwardable
  include ForwardableExtension
end