From: Jamey Cribbs <jcribbs@...>
Date: 2006-04-07T04:38:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Methods that return a hash or an exception?

Sean Hussey wrote:

>Hi everyone,
>
>I'm not quite sure how to handle this type of thing.  I have a method
>that searches for a user in our LDAP by way of a Person model's
>username attribute:
>
>@ldap_person = @person.get_ldap_user
>
>This method, noce done with the LDAP wrangling, returns the user entry
>(an LDAP::Entry object) as a hash:
>
>return conn.search2(UnifiedLDAP::PEOPLE_DN, LDAP::LDAP_SCOPE_SUBTREE,
>filter, self.ldap_attributes)[0].to_hash
>
>This works, and, of course, there SHOULD be an LDAP entry
>corresponding to that Person, but if there isn't or LDAP is
>unreachable, I want to report that.  Am I doing the wrong thing in
>returning a hash?  Where should I be catching exceptions?  How should
>I be then be dealing with them?
>
>This is part of a Rails app, but I don't think that part is important,
>so I'm sticking to this list.  When I pass @ldap_person to the view,
>though, and @ldap_person is an exception, obviously, this doesn't
>work.
>  
>
One idea off the top of my head would be to catch the exception in 
#get_ldap_user and have the rescue clause return nil.  Then, when you 
pass @ldap_person to your view, you could have something like:  <% 
@ldap_person || "" %> in your rhtml file, so that if @ldap_person is 
nil, it just prints an empty string.

HTH,

Jamey