Hi Gabe, I'd recommend the small and very versatile andand gem for the use case that you mention. In that case, the use case becomes:
params[:order].andand[:shipping_info].andand[:country] loosing very little expressiveness, not having to revert to rescuing exceptions, etc. Best, -- Ufuk Kayserilioglu On 10 November 2014 at 22:22:02, Gabe Kopley (gabriel.kop...@gmail.com) wrote: Hi folks, For better or worse, this is a pattern you see pretty often in real-world Rails code [0]: params[:order] && params[:order][:shipping_info] && params[:order][:shipping_info][:country] or params[:order][:shipping_info][:country] rescue nil or params.fetch(:order, {}).fetch(:shipping_info, {}).fetch(:country, nil) What if we had a method to accomplish this more concisely? Eg. params.traverse_nested_params_and_return_nil_if_a_key_isnt_found(:order, :shipping_info, :country) Or to take a nice method name suggestion [1]: params.dig(:order, :shipping_info, :country) Another example solution is https://github.com/intridea/hashie#deepfetch (Although I don't like "fetch" in this method name since it doesn't and can't take a default value as an argument like Hash#fetch does) Would a method like this possibly belong in ActionController::Parameters? Or maybe even in Active Support extensions on Hash (gasp!)? Or is it just an all-around terrible idea? Thanks, Gabe [0] Sources: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubyonrails-core/bOkvcvS3t_A/QXLEXwt9ivAJ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1820451/ruby-style-how-to-check-whether-a-nested-hash-element-exists https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19115838/how-do-i-use-the-fetch-method-for-nested-hash https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10130726/ruby-access-multidimensional-hash-and-avoid-access-nil-object [1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/1820492/283398 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.