Managing Return Value of ActiveRecord Transactions

I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to know the return state of a transaction in ActiveRecord. Basically, I wanted to know if it succeeded or failed, then return true/false.

There's 3 scenarios to keep in mind to when trying to use this approach:

1. Transaction succeeds - the last line of the transaction is the return

   class TestModel
    def save
      result =
        ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
          SomeModel.last.touch
        end
   
      result
    end
   end
   
   > TestModel.new.save
   => true

2. Transaction rollbacks - transactions handle ActiveRecord::Rollback by default, so the transaction block returns nil

   class TestModel
    def save
      result =
        ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
          raise ActiveRecord::Rollback
        end
   
      result
    end
   end
   
   > TestModel.new.save
   => nil

3. Other Errors - any errors raised inside the transaction will be raised by the block

   class TestModel
    def save
      result =
        ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
          raise ActiveRecord::Rollback
        end
   
      result
    end
   end
   
   > TestModel.new.save
   StandardError: StandardError from .....

Putting it all together now, we can return a true/false for all scenarios -

class TestModel
    def save
      result =
        ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
          SomeModel.new(attrs).save!
          OtherModel.new(other_attrs).save!
        end

      result

      did_save = !!result
      did_save
    rescue => e
       false
    end
end