Scenario
Imagine you have an account that has an owner and you want to get the owner’s address. If you want to be safe and not risk a nil error, you would write something like the following:
if account && account.owner && account.owner.address
...
end
This is really verbose and annoying to type. ActiveSupport includes the try method which has a similar behaviour (but with few key differences that will be discussed later):
if account.try(:owner).try(:address)
...
end
It accomplishes the same thing - it either returns the address or nil if some value along the chain is nil. The first example may also return false if, for example, the owner is set to false.