ruby rails 4 initialize and increment instance variables

Question

I have been tinkering with various ways to clean this up and I was wondering if it is more ideal to break this into small methods or way to accomplish this on a single line?

  def run_counters
    @num_attempts ||= 0
    @num_attempts += retry_attempt
    @all_attempts ||= 0
    @all_attempts += retry_limit
  end

Answer 1

Either initialize the variables in your class's constructor (that's specifically what it's for!) or define accessor methods to isolate the initialization logic for each variable:

# via constructor:

def initialize
  @num_attempts = 0
  @all_attempts = 0
end

def run_counters
  num_attempts += retry_attempt
  all_attempts += retry_limit
end

Or:

# via accessor methods:

def run_counters
  num_attempts += retry_attempt
  all_attempts += retry_limit
end

def num_attempts
  @num_attempts ||= 0
end

def all_attempts
  @all_attempts ||= 0
end

This also means you may safely access num_attempts and all_attempts from any other method, and not have to duplicate the initialization logic.