I just learned from Marcel Molina a graceful way to return an object from a method. In old days, I often have to write a method like this:

   def born(params={})
     person = Person.new params
     person.do_something
     person.save!
     person
  end

The last line bothered me a lot, it looks ugly.

But just as usual, Rails addresses it, that is method returning. With this method, now I can modify my previous example to the following:

   def born(params={})
     returning Person.new(params) do |person|
       person.do_something
       person.save!
     end
  end

Basically what this method does is return the argument you give to the returning method, AFTER processing it further in the block. Simply beautiful.

For your convenience, here’s a link to the documentation. By the way it’s also very interesting to see what else rails offers in that class. They could come in handy sometimes. Here’s a link to an explanation of K Combinator. You can find tons of related links through our old dear friend google.