Skip to content

Conversation

@ardder
Copy link

@ardder ardder commented Jul 3, 2013

No description provided.

@jwo
Copy link
Member

jwo commented Jul 16, 2013

Sorry about missing this! I'm on it this morning.

Copy link
Member

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Later we use this method (add) as:

puts "[#{movie.title}] is already on your list!" unless movie_list.add(movie)

This means this method is responsible for two things:

  1. keeping the movies unique (prevent dupes)
  2. telling you if the movie was a dupe

There are exceptions to this rule, but I think Command/Query separation is a good one to follow. More: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CommandQuerySeparation.html & http://tony.pitluga.com/2011/08/04/command-query-separation-in-ruby.html

In this specific case, I might add a "contains?" method

if movie_list.contains? movie
  puts "[#{movie.title}] is already on your list!"
else
  movie_list.add movie
end

thoughts? what do you think?

Copy link
Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Thanks for the links about Command/Query separation!

The idea of MovieList#add is actually derived from ActiveRecord::Base#save. I want to use the return value (true/false) to let the user know if he adds the movie successfully or not.

After reading the links, I think that separating the two idea is a better and cleaner design. But inside the MovieList#add, I still want to check if the argument is duplicated or not. Because I believe that MovieList#add should have the responsibility to protect the internal data from messed up by the user.

When I try to implement the new method, how to handle bad argument comes into question. Should I just neglect it or throw an exception? Which one will you choose? Or, maybe you have a better idea? 😄

Copy link
Member

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

sure, I can buy that -- if you want MovieList#add to not:

  1. not add the item if it exists
  2. tell the program something bad happened if someone tried to add a dupe:

in MovieList#add I would raise an exception if it is contained when you try to add it.

@jwo
Copy link
Member

jwo commented Jul 17, 2013

Most excellent job! especially with the tests! Go you!

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants