Shortcircuit evaluations

Rails
1

This is probably a Ruby questions but since my issue exists in a Rails
validation I thought I’d post here. I have the following validator

validates_each :thumbnail, :regular do |record, attribute, value|
unless value.nil? &&
value.valid?
record.errors.add(
attribute, value.errors.full_messages[0])
end
end

I’m getting a ‘nil object when you didn’t expect it error’ because the
condition is evaluating value.valid?. I was under the impression that if
the first condition (value.nil?) returned True then the second condition
would not be evaluated.

Does anyone know what I’m missing here?

If I rewrite it as:
validates_each :thumbnail, :regular do |record, attribute, value|
unless value.nil?
record.errors.add(
attribute, value.errors.full_messages[0]) unless value.valid?
end
end

it works fine.

Thanks for any education,
William

2

William LeFevre wrote:

This is probably a Ruby questions but since my issue exists in a Rails
validation I thought I’d post here. I have the following validator

validates_each :thumbnail, :regular do |record, attribute, value|
unless value.nil? &&
value.valid?
record.errors.add(
attribute, value.errors.full_messages[0])
end
end

I’m getting a ‘nil object when you didn’t expect it error’ because the
condition is evaluating value.valid?. I was under the impression that if
the first condition (value.nil?) returned True then the second condition
would not be evaluated.

Logic error I believe. That is an AND condition, therefore if the LHS is
true it has to evaluate the RHS. If the LHS was false then it would
short circuit the evaluation of the RHS. You probably want a ! in there
somewhere.

3

Logic error. Use OR instead of AND.

-Derrick S.