Can i make Rails this code more elegant?

Question

I have this class:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  attr_accessor :name, :email, :hr_id

  def initialize(attributes = {:name => "Missing Name",:email => "Missing Email",:hr_id => "Missing HR ID"})
      @name = attributes[:name]
      @email = attributes[:email]
      @hr_id = attributes[:hr_id]
  end

  def print_employee
    "Employee No: #{@hr_id} - #{@name} (#{@email})"
  end
end

And i use it like this:

def help
    employee = User.new
    employee.name = "Dude"
    employee.email  = "Dude@gmail.com"
    employee.hr_id = "129836561"
    @employee = employee.print_employee
end

My question is, how can i make the code in help shorter and more elegant?

I tried:

employee = User.new('dude','dude@gmail.com','129836561')
@employee = employee.print_employee 

But i got errors.

Answer 1

You are looking for after_initialize and/or after_find callbacks. See the docs

after_initialize :set_default_values

private

def set_default_values
  self.name ||= 'Missing name'
end

NOTE

As apneadiving has mentioned, this is not the correct way to approach your problem but I think this is the best answer to your question how to make the code more elegant . For best practice, search for service classes like apneadiving's answer and how to use them in your controller to set default values.

Answer 2

Do this:

class UserBuilder

  attr_reader :params

  def initialize(params = {})
    @params = params
  end

  def build
    User.new(default_params.merge(params))
  end

  def default_params
    {
      :name => "Missing Name",
      :email => "Missing Email",
      :hr_id => "Missing HR ID"
    }
  end
end

Then:

UserBuilder.new.build

Or:

UserBuilder.new({:name => 'foo'}).build

Answer 3

So I did a Google search for something like "ActiveRecord default values", and one of the things I found was this Ruby gem that's supposed to set this up for you, so it might be worth checking out: default_value_for .

Example usage from the docs:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  default_value_for :name, "(no name)"
  default_value_for :last_seen do
    Time.now
  end
end

u = User.new
u.name       # => "(no name)"
u.last_seen  # => Mon Sep 22 17:28:38 +0200 2008