Establishing parameters for a sales report, with default boolean and date values

Question

The idea is that I am getting the params from a GET request in the form of a Hash (symbol→str) and I want to transform them into dates and booleans. For that reason, I created two private methods to_date and to_b.

class Report
  include ActiveModel::Model

  attr_accessor :start_date, :end_date, :show_sales, :show_daily_active_users,
                :show_registered_cc, :show_all_time_registered_cc, :show_users

  def initialize(params)
    params ||= {}
    @start_date = to_date(params, :start_date, Time.zone.today - 7.days)
    @end_date = to_date params, :end_date, Time.zone.today
    @show_sales = to_b params, :show_sales, true
    @show_daily_active_users = to_b params, :show_daily_active_users, true
    @show_registered_cc = to_b params, :show_registered_cc
    @show_all_time_registered_cc = to_b params, :show_all_time_registered_cc
    @show_users = to_b params, :show_users
  end

  def sales
     (...)
  end

  (...)

  private

  def to_date(params, key, default_val)
    if params.key?(key)
      Date.parse(params[key])
    else
      default_val
    end
  end

  def to_b(params, key, default_true = false)
    default_val = '1' if default_true
    params.fetch(key, default_val) == '1'
  end
end

The problem is that Rubocop says that the Assignment Branch Condition size for the method initialize is too high (15.81 over a limit of 15).

Is there anything I could change to fix that? I don't think that creating a new class just to do that is worth it.

Answer 1

You could reduce branching and improve readability by requiring the default for to_b to be explicitly stated. (It seems a bit excessive to have a default for the default, don't you think?)

The branching is not my primary concern, though. The constructor seems to have a very copy-and-paste pattern. Metaprogramming could help here, I think. It would be nice to write…

class Report
  include ActiveModel::Model
  include ParamAccessors

  date_param_accessor(:start_date) { |today| today - 7.days }
  date_param_accessor :end_date
  bool_param_accessor :show_sales, true
  bool_param_accessor :show_daily_active_users, false
  bool_param_accessor :show_registered_cc, false
  bool_param_accessor :show_all_time_registered_cc, false
  bool_param_accessor :show_users, false

  def initialize(params)
    @params = params
  end

  def sales
     …
  end
end

This mixin could make that possible:

module ParamAccessors
  def self.included(base)
    base.extend ClassMethods
  end

  module ClassMethods
    def date_param_accessor(name, default=nil)
      attr_writer(name)
      define_method(name) do
        if instance_variable_defined?("@#{name}")
          instance_variable_get("@#{name}")
        else
          @params.fetch(name, default) or
          (yield Time.zone.today if block_given?) or
          return Time.zone.today
        end
      end
    end

    def bool_param_accessor(name, default)
      attr_writer(name)
      define_method(name) do
        if instance_variable_defined?("@#{name}")
          instance_variable_get("@#{name}")
        else
          @params.fetch(name, default)
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

This assumes that the object is transient, such that the constructor and the start_date/end_date methods will be called on the same day.