Current code works as long as there is no remote error:
def get_name_from_remote_url
cstr = "http://someurl.com"
getresult = open(cstr, "UserAgent" => "Ruby-OpenURI").read
doc = Nokogiri::XML(getresult)
my_data = doc.xpath("/session/name").text
# => 'Fred' or 'Sam' etc
return my_data
end
But, what if the remote URL times out or returns nothing? How I detect that and return nil, for example?
And, does Open-URI give a way to define how long to wait before giving up? This method is called while a user is waiting for a response, so how do we set a max timeoput time before we give up and tell the user "sorry the remote server we tried to access is not available right now"?