Find out if attributes are identical I have an array of active record objects. All objects have an attribute result and the value of result can be either 'failed' or 'passed'.

My goal is to find out if all result attributes are identical. If not then I will have to return mixed but if they are then I return the value of the attributes.

I currently have this code:

if tests.map(&amp;:result).uniq.count != 1
   'mixed'
else
   tests.first.result
end


But that first line is quite ugly. I'm sure there is a better way to find out if all results are identical or not but I can't think of any.
You could try the appropriately named #all? method:

reference = tests.first.result
if tests.all? { |test| test.result == reference }
  reference
else
  'mixed'
end


Edit: As tokland points out, you'll want to check if tests is empty before any of this. Otherwise, tests.first will of course be nil.

But you could also do the check in the database layer with something like:

if Test.select(:result).distinct.count &gt; 1
  'mixed'
else
  Test.first.try(:result)
end


Obviously you'll want to scope the query more specifically.

Also note that here, an empty collection returns a nil (because if Test.first is nil, then .try(:result) will also be nil).