Question

I have a simple model:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :projects

Project has a few attributes like :date, :name, and for those attributes I have attribute query methods available to me:

project.date?
project.name?

But I don’t have:

project.user?

Instead I have:

project.user_id?

A glance at the code shows this is because the actual “attribute” is the user_id, and that’s all that the attribute query methods are intended for? It seems like a logical extension of the idea to have query methods for the relations as well.

What’s the common practice? Seems we have a few rough equivalents to choose from:

project.user.present?
project.user.blank?
project.user.nil?

Or just use the {relation}_id? method and stop whining?

Answer 1

Why not just define a method on project yourself to meet the API that you are expecting?

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base

  def user?
   true if user.present?
  end
end

I think the best practice in Ruby, and frankly in all programming is to clearly specify your interface, and if you think that user? is the best way to do that, then I say go for it.