Question

I have an app where users can sign up with Facebook, in which case I take the Facebook image, or they can sign up using regular authentication, in which case they’re uploading a photo using CarrierWave gem.

Because of some sort of conflict, I had to create a column in the database (:image)to store the url to the Facebook image, and then a different column (:dimage) to store the url for the image if they signed up using the non-facebook sign up.

So when it comes time to display the user, I’m checking to see if there’s an :image, and, if not, then displaying the other :dimage.

However, I don’t want to require them to upload an image, in which case, I want to display an anon image (here represented by the rails.png). However, the Rails.png isn’t showing up (just a broken image path), so I’m assuming there’s some sort of error with my if else syntax because the image_tag("rails.png") is taken straight from the api

 <% if user.image %>
 <%= image_tag user.image %>
 <% elsif user.dimage %>
 <%= image_tag user.dimage_url(:thumb).to_s %>
 <% else %>
 <%= image_tag("rails.png") %>
 <% end %>

The generated html on the rails.png

<img alt="Assets" src="/assets/">

Answer 1

Use the present? method to check if the attribute is not empty:

<% if user.image.present? %>
  <%= image_tag user.image %>
<% elsif user.dimage.present? %>
  <%= image_tag user.dimage_url(:thumb).to_s %>
<% else %>
  <%= image_tag("rails.png") %>
<% end %>

You’ll save yourself a headache or two because in Ruby the only falsehoods are false and nil. This means that the empty string "" will actually return true.