I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging here, and I think I have been blocked by the fact that many of the posts in my mental backlog are somewhat large in scope.  So here’s a useful bit of ActiveRecord trivia that I just learned.

When no records are found, the “find” method (ie Person.find(‘badinput’)) throws ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound.

However, any find_by_* method, such as Person.find_by_netid(‘badinput’), will return nil.

This was rather confusing as I focused on the error handling semantics of the Banner API.  I want that exception.  Good news, though:

find_by_netid!(‘badinput’) throws the exception.  The bang changes the behavior, as it often does, though not always in the way you may expect.

TLDR:

2.0.0-p353 :001 > Person.find('badinput')
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound: Couldn't find Person with ndid=badinput <snip>

2.0.0-p353 :002 > Person.find_by_netid('badinput')
 => nil 

2.0.0-p353 :003 > Person.find_by_netid!('badinput')
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound: Couldn't find Person with netid = badinput <snip>

So that’s it.  Maybe this will get me back in the habit.  Happy coding!