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][Amiel], my coworker at [Carnes

Media][carnes], 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][commit]:

{% 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].

[Amiel]: http://twitter.com/amielmartin

[carnes]: http://carnesmedia.com

[commit]: https://github.com/carnesmedia/rails/commit/d6fcfe9ddc646849c8f5a70325c82d20f7f85259