ruby 32 lines · 9 steps

Safely closing an Account in Rails

An Active Record model coordinates cascading cleanup, a destroy guard, and a transactional closure workflow.

Explained by highlit

Rails Intermediate associations callbacks transactions scopes data integrity

1class Account < ApplicationRecord
2  has_many :projects, dependent: :destroy_async
3  has_many :memberships, dependent: :destroy_async
4  has_many :invoices, dependent: :restrict_with_error
5  has_one :billing_profile, dependent: :destroy_async
6 
7  before_destroy :ensure_no_open_balance
8 
9  scope :dormant, -> { where(last_active_at: ..90.days.ago) }
10 
11  def schedule_closure!(reason:)
12    transaction do
13      update!(status: :closing, closure_reason: reason, closed_at: Time.current)
14      AccountClosedMailer.with(account: self).confirmation.deliver_later
15    end
16 
17    destroy
18  end
19 
20  private
21 
22  def ensure_no_open_balance
23    return if outstanding_balance.zero?
24 
25    errors.add(:base, "cannot close an account with an outstanding balance")
26    throw :abort
27  end
28 
29  def outstanding_balance
30    invoices.unpaid.sum(:amount_cents)
31  end
32end

01 / 01

STEP 01

Walkthrough

Space play ←→ step click any line

Three takeaways

1Choosing the right dependent: option per association encodes your data-integrity rules directly in the model.
2Wrapping state changes and side effects in a transaction keeps the record and its notifications consistent.
3A before_destroy callback that throws :abort lets you veto deletion while surfacing a user-facing error.

Related explainers

ruby

require "shellwords"
require "open3"
 
module Backup

Building safe shell commands in Ruby

shell-out subprocess command-injection

Intermediate 7 steps

php

<?php
 
namespace App\Services\Checkout;

Validating coupons with Laravel's Pipeline

pipeline chain of responsibility transactions

Intermediate 7 steps

ruby

class UserAgentParser
  BROWSERS = [
    [/Edg\/([\d.]+)/, "Edge"],
    [/OPR\/([\d.]+)/, "Opera"],

Parsing user-agent strings in Ruby

regex pattern-matching lookup-tables

Intermediate 8 steps

ruby

class LogAggregator
  BUCKET_FORMAT = "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M"
 
  def initialize(entries)

Bucketing log entries by the minute in Ruby

aggregation hashing enumerable

Intermediate 5 steps

ruby

class WeeklySignupsReport
  DEFAULT_WEEKS = 12
 
  def initialize(weeks: DEFAULT_WEEKS, source: User.all)

Building a weekly signups report in Rails

service object aggregation group by

Intermediate 7 steps

ruby

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  EXPERIMENTS = {
    checkout_button_color: %w[control blue green],
    onboarding_flow: %w[control streamlined]