Rails: Create association if none is found to avoid nil errors

There's an elegantly simple form:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_one :preference_set
  
  def preference_set
    super || build_preference_set
  end
end

ActiveRecord intentionally enables such use of super to override the behaviour of association methods.

Well the best way to do this is to create the associated record when you create the primary one:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_one       :preference_set, :autosave => true
   before_create :build_preference_set
end

That will set it up so whenever a User is created, so is a PreferenceSet. If you need to initialise the the associated record with arguments, then call a different method in before_create which calls build_preference_set(:my_options => "here") and then returns true.

You can then just normalise all existing records by iterating over any that don't have a PreferenceSet and building one by calling #create_preference_set.

If you want to only create the PreferenceSet when it is absolutely needed, then you can do something like:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_one :preference_set

   def preference_set_with_initialize
     preference_set_without_initialize || build_preference_set
   end

   alias_method_chain :preference_set, :initialize
end