Ruby: Inline Rescue

On my current project we use action specific Presenters 20% of the time. We opened ActionController and ActionView and redefined the render methods to automatically create presenters based on convention. For example the CommentsController has a show action, so render will try to create Comments::ShowPresenter when the show action is rendered. This works well for us, but like I said we only need a specific presenter 20% of the time. The other 80% of the time we still want a presenter that contains basic methods necessary on each page, but it is not specific to an action.

We solved this issue by attempting to create the specific presenter and rescuing with the base presenter.

klass = "#{action}_presenter".camelize.constantize rescue Presenter
@presenter = klass.new

Inline rescues promote concise code, but they shouldn't be overused to create overly complex lines of code. For example, I probably could have combined the two lines above into one line, but that would be a bit much to digest in my opinion.

In the example we attempt to create the class using constantize, but if an error (like uninitialized constant) occurs we rescue with the base Presenter class. Either way, the result is assigned to the klass local variable.