Question

class TwitterProfile < ActiveRecord::Base

  def send_status_update(status_update)
    if publish?
      client = Twitter::Client.new( :oauth_token => authentication.token,
                           :oauth_token_secret => authentication.secret)
      client.update(status_update.to_twitter_string)
    end
  rescue Exception => e
    logger.info "Error publishing to twitter: #{e.to_s}"
  end
end

There is a StatusUpdate model and an observer that reposts them to Twitter in after_create. I sometimes get the following exception:

NameError (undefined local variable or method `e' for #<TwitterProfile:0x00000004e44ab8>):
app/models/twitter_profile.rb:23:in `rescue in send_status_update'
app/models/twitter_profile.rb:18:in `send_status_update'
app/models/status_update_observer.rb:6:in `block in after_create'
app/models/status_update_observer.rb:4:in `after_create'
app/models/workout_observer.rb:5:in `after_update'
app/controllers/frames_controller.rb:76:in `update'
app/controllers/application_controller.rb:24:in `call'
app/controllers/application_controller.rb:24:in `block (2 levels) in <class:ApplicationController>'
app/controllers/application_controller.rb:10:in `block in <class:ApplicationController>'

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

I have one thing I know and one that’s just a wild guess.

The thing I know is that you don’t need to call to_s on an overall #{} expression; that will happen automatically. But it does no harm.

My wild guess is that your test case is not really running the code you have posted. What happens if you change e to f?

I should note that rescuing Exception itself is usually a bad idea. You should rescue RuntimeError or StandardError at the highest, and preferably something more specific. You can get fairly strange errors when rescuing Exception because you interfere with threads and interpreter-level events.