Array.unwrap

I often have situations in Rails where I’m calling a method that either returns a single object or an array of many objects. Take, for example, an ActiveRecord query that will return a User based on certain specifications:

{% gist 6396286 %}

In this instance, you’d expect it to return a single User. Because it’s an AR query, however, it returns an instance of ActiveRecord::Relation. For our purposes, this is an array.

In this situation, my solution has often been to just call user.first. I’m not a huge fan of this because it’s an array with only one object inside of it

• calling first seems to be an inaccurate way of basically saying “get the object out of the array”.

I discussed this with Amiel Martin, my coworker at Carnes Media, and we determined that this is a pretty standard thing to run into, and the kind of thing that might be a good Rails pull request.

We came up with this implementation:

{% gist 6396310 %}

The method unwrap makes more sense than calling first on an array that only has one object.

We’re in the process of preparing this functionality for submission as a Rails PR - there’s so many pull requests at any given time that we’ve sought out some thoughts from other Rails programmers on the implementation. If you have any thoughts on it, feel free to contact me or Amiel.