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Creating Long-Lived Web Apps with Ruby on Rails

Return Rich Result Objects, Not Booleans or Active Records

Understand how to enhance Rails business logic by returning rich result objects that provide detailed outcomes instead of simple booleans or Active Record instances. Learn to create clear, explicit return values that improve readability, make testing more robust, and allow easier future changes in your Rails applications.

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Enriching call results for clarity

A caller often needs to know what happened in the call they made. Not always, but often. Typical reasons are to report errors back to the user or to feed into the logic it needs to execute. As part of the seam between the outside world and our business logic, a boolean value—true if the call succeeded, false otherwise—is not very useful and can be hard to manage.

If, instead, we return a richer object that exposes details the caller needs, our code and tests be more readable, and our seam can now grow more easily if needs change.

A rich result doesn’t have to be fancy. We like creating them as inner classes of the service’s class as a pretty basic Ruby class, like so:

Ruby
class WidgetsCreator
  def create_widget(widget_params)
    if ...
      Result.new(created: true, widget: widget)
    else
      Result.new(created: false, widget: widget)
    end
  end
  class Result
    attr_reader :widget
    def initialize(created:, widget: nil)
      @created = created
      @widget = widget
    end
    def created?
      @created
    end
  end
end
...