Question

Is using 50 if-else statements too resource-intensive for one action?

I’m doing something like this:

if team.players.count > 1
   assign_team_type(..)
elsif team.players.count > 3
   assign_team_type(..)
...
etc.
...
end

Also, is it more efficient to place the 50 if-else statements in your create action inside your controller instead of the after_create method? Or would it be more efficient to use a case switch statement instead, or just avoid it altogether?

EDIT: Thanks for the very quick responses! The code is for a community sports tournament to assign teams based on the number of players on that team. I’m trying to write something that assigns a team type to each team according to how many players are added to that team. So there are teams for 1 player, 3 players, 5 players, 7 players, etc., up to 200 players, which requires 50 if-else statements in total.

The statements happen in the players_controller, after the user visits http://localhost/players/new, adds a player, and then the application decides what team to assign his or her team based on how many players are currently on that team. It’s very straight-forward (a basic CRUD application that just needs these 50 if-else statements)

models:

Team (has_many :players)
Player (belongs_to :team)

scaffold team name:string team_type:string
scaffold player team_id:integer name:string

That’s pretty much it 🙂

Answer 1

You could try to rewrite it as

assign_team_type(case team.players.count
                 when 2    then ...
                 when 3..5 then ...
                 else raise "Assignment failed"
                 end
)

which should probably be faster as team.players.count is evaluated only once. Additionally it is cleaner and shorter. A benchmark will help.