An issue came up yesterday that involved an strange nil error, where an attribute was being delegated to a nil association.

I recalled reading this ticket opened by court3nay from caboo.se and thought it might come in handy for others if I put it in the blogosphere.

The ticket ended up being closed because it was deemed unnecessary. Someone with the moniker “protocool” (presumably trevor at http://protocool.com/) shared the final solution which works out of the box with no patches. It goes something like this:

delegate :some_method, :to => '(some_association or return nil)'

The cool thing about this solution, over the proposed patch, is that you can do whatever you like (rather than simply return nil), such as return a default value or raise a custom exception.