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Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) in Ruby on Rails

March 14, 2014

DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a principle of Software Development to reducing repetition of information or codes. We can apply DRY quite broadly to database schema, test plan, system, even documentation. And in this post, we will take example of DRY in Ruby on Rails development.

In particular case, if you find some methods whose definitions are more or less similar, only different by the method name, it may use meta programming to simplify the things to make your model more clean and DRY. Consider this simple example where we have an article with three states.

Before

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base

  def self.all_published
    where("state = ?", "published")
  end

  def self.all_draft
    where("state = ?", "draft")
  end

  def self.all_spam
    where("state = ?", "spam")
  end

  def published?
    self.state == 'published'
  end

  def draft?
    self.state == 'draft'
  end

  def spam?
    self.state == 'spam'
  end
end

After

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base

  STATES = ['draft', 'published', 'spam']

  class << self
    STATES.each do |state_name|
      define_method "all_#{state_name}" do
        where("state = ?", state_name)
      end
    end
  end

  STATES.each do |state_name|
    define_method "#{state_name}?" do
      self.state == state_name
    end
  end

end

When the DRY principle is applied successfully, a modification of any single element of a system does not require a change in other logically unrelated elements. Additionally, elements that are logically related all change predictably and uniformly, and are thus kept in sync. This makes your code more DRY and more clean. And adding more states makes it more easy to modify.

Written by Irfan Fadilah - Author at 41studio
Reference: Code Bear Startups & Wikipedia

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