How could I improve my code by reducing return statements

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:

Hi, all! Below you can find the code I wrote. The thing is I first wrote it without the first return statement and after running the tests and failing I realized that after deleting the tracks property I was creating it again further down the code. So I added this return statement to exit the code. Would any of you have an idea on how I could do it so I don’t need to have to equal lines “return collections;”? Thanks!

Your code so far


// Setup
var collection = {
2548: {
  album: "Slippery When Wet",
  artist: "Bon Jovi",
  tracks: [
    "Let It Rock",
    "You Give Love a Bad Name"
  ]
},
2468: {
  album: "1999",
  artist: "Prince",
  tracks: [
    "1999",
    "Little Red Corvette"
  ]
},
1245: {
  artist: "Robert Palmer",
  tracks: [ ]
},
5439: {
  album: "ABBA Gold"
}
};

// Only change code below this line
function updateRecords(id, prop, value) {
if (value === "") {
delete collection[id][prop]
return collection;
}
if (prop !== "tracks" && value != "") {
collection[id][prop] = value
} 
if (prop === "tracks") {
if (collection[id].tracks === undefined){
  collection[id][prop] = []
}
collection[id].tracks.push(value)
}

return collection;
}

updateRecords(5439, "artist", "ABBA");

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.61 Safari/537.36.

Challenge: Record Collection

Link to the challenge:

2

You can use else-if instead of if here, so you won’t create deleted property again, and this way you don’t need return here.

2 Likes
3

What @ZWHimself said.

Your style is making it hard to see what’s going on in your code:

function updateRecords(id, prop, value) {
  // Delete property if value is empty string
  if (value === "") {
    delete collection[id][prop]
    return collection;
  }
  // Set prop to value if not a track
  // ***************************************************************
  // Note: If you used an else-if you wouldn't need && value "== ""
  // Also note: You should *always* use strict comparison (so not != or ==)
  // ***************************************************************
  if (prop !== "tracks" && value != "") {
    collection[id][prop] = value
  } 
  // If property is tracks, add track
  // ***************************************************************
  // Note: you didn't exclude value === ""
  //   so you need the return above so you don't execute this clause
  //   This is also where an else-if would be great
  // ***************************************************************
  if (prop === "tracks") {
    // Check if no tracks yet
    if (collection[id].tracks === undefined) {
      collection[id][prop] = []
    }
    // Push value onto tracks
    collection[id].tracks.push(value)
  }
  // Return
  return collection;
}
2 Likes
4

Many thanks guys! So just to double check you would suggest me to re-write the code in the following way?:

function updateRecords(id, prop, value) {
  // Delete property if value is empty string
  if (value === "") {
    delete collection[id][prop]
  } else if (prop !== "tracks") {   //Set prop to value if not a track
    collection[id][prop] = value
  } else if (prop === "tracks") {  //If property is tracks, add track
    // Check if no tracks yet
    if (collection[id].tracks === undefined) {
      collection[id][prop] = []
    }
    // Push value onto tracks
    collection[id].tracks.push(value)
  }
  // Return
  return collection;
}
5

You got it. Nice work.

1 Like
6

Thanks again man! Appreciate the fast response :ok_hand:

1 Like