Check if ActiveRecord object is destroyed using the .destroy() return value

Question

I am maintaining someone's code base and they have something like this:

if @widget_part.destroy
  flash[:message] = "Error deleting widget part"
else
  flash[:message] = "Widget part destroyed successfully"
end

What does destroy return? Is it ok to test like this? The reason I'm asking is that I tried to use

flash[:message] = "Error deleting widget part : #{@widget_part.errors.inspect}"

and there are no error messages so I am confused. It gives something like

#<ActiveModel::Errors:0x00000103e118e8 @base=#<WidgetPart widget_id: 7, ..., 
  id: 67>, @messages={}>

Answer 1

As some people mentioned above, that destroy does not return a boolean value, instead it returns a frozen object. And additionally it does update the state of the instance object that you call it on. Here is how I write the controller:

@widget_part.destroy

if @widget_part.destroyed?
  flash[:success] = 'The part is destroyed'
else
  flash[:error] = 'Failed to destroy'
end