When are quotations need?

[rtwoods88]

Hello,
I’m on the “Record Collection” challenge of the Javascript course and I am having trouble understanding why the key “tracks” needs to be in quotations in the If statements. In previous challenges I was able to access the key of an object without it but this challenge fails if I don’t include it. Can someone please explain this or point me to a link that can help me understand when quotations are necessary?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  **Your code so far**

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

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

updateRecords(recordCollection, 5439, 'artist', 'ABBA');

  **Your browser information:**

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.45 Safari/537.36

Challenge: Record Collection

Link to the challenge:

freeCodeCamp.org

[colinthornton]

Because prop is a string, and you’re comparing it to the string "tracks".

You can still access the tracks property on the record via records[id].tracks, in the case that prop === "tracks" then that would be the same as records[id][prop].

[rtwoods88]

So, prop needed to equal the actual string “tracks” and without the quotes it would be compared to the value of tracks instead of the word itself?

[colinthornton]

Right, if you wrote prop === tracks, then you’d be saying “compare the value of the variable named prop to the value of the variable named tracks”, but in this case tracks would be undefined, because a variable with that name doesn’t exist in the scope.

[rtwoods88]

that makes perfect sense. Thanks for the clarification.