Question

For a long time I tried desperately to get this to work, I’ve googled, I’ve tinkered, and I’ve asked some local Rubyists (though not pdx.rb, though I really should).

We were trying to do something like this at work:

case user.roles.included? (... magic ...) 
when ['admin', 'editor'] 
  then ...
when ['anonymous'] 
  then ...
end

So you can see how it feels like a case, but because it’s not using === as El noted, it doesn’t work. I know I can use if but it feels like a place where a case should be used.

Answer 1

when uses the === operator to compare the value given to case against the argument given to when. Also then is unnecessary when appearing on a different line from the when statement The correct code for what you’re trying to do is:

case x
when 16
  puts 'hi'
when Object
  puts 'obj'
end

As for the new addition to the question:

case user.roles.included? (... magic ...) 
when ['admin', 'editor'] 
  ... 
when ['anonymous'] 
  ... 
end

This doesn’t work because Array’s === doesn’t map to include. I’m not sure where Array’s === operator comes from or even what it does, but you could override it to provide the functionality you want.

Judging by the above code you want the case to trigger if one of the users roles matches the array. This will override Array#=== to do just that:

class Array
  def === other_array
    ! (other_array & self).empty?
  end
end

case user.roles
when ['admin', 'editor'] 
  ... 
when ['anonymous'] 
  ... 
end

Caveat: Depending on where you override Array#=== this can have unforeseen consequences, as it will change all arrays in that scope. Given that === is being inherited from Object where it is an alias for ==, I’m not expecting it to be a big problem.

Places where the new === differs from the old ===:

• New === will return true if either array is a subset or reordering of the other.
• Old === will only return true if the two arrays are identical (order and contents).

So far as I know, case/when is the only time === could be implicitly called on an array.