Book Image

Refactoring TypeScript

By : James Hickey
Book Image

Refactoring TypeScript

By: James Hickey

Overview of this book

Refactoring improves your code without changing its behavior. With refactoring, the best approach is to apply small targeted changes to a codebase. Instead of doing a huge sweeping change to your code, refactoring is better as a long-term and continuous enterprise. Refactoring TypeScript explains how to spot bugs and remove them from your code. You’ll start by seeing how wordy conditionals, methods, and null checks make code unhealthy and unstable. Whether it is identifying messy nested conditionals or removing unnecessary methods, this book will show various techniques to avoid these pitfalls and write code that is easier to understand, maintain, and test. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned some of the main causes of unhealthy code, tips to identify them and techniques to address them.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Pipe Classes

In the last section, we created a new class, UserIsActiveAdmin, and ended up with this:

const activeAdminCanEdit: boolean = new UserIsActiveAdmin(user).invoke() 
    && user.canEdit();
if(activeAdminCanEdit) {
    // Do stuff.
}

Building these kinds of classes that deal with a single test or condition helps us to build lots of smaller pieces that we can later combine together for more complex scenarios.

This refactoring is useful, but I want to show you an even more flexible way to build these classes.

Your Classes Might Be Doing Too Much...

Looking at the code sample at the beginning of the chapter, what if we wanted to further combine all the logic into a single class?

We might call it UserIsActiveAdminAndCanEdit. Okay.

And that might be fine. But what if we have, let's say, eight different conditionals we need to check here?

Our class might have this name:

CheckOneCheckTwoCheckThreeCheckFourCheckFiveCheckSixCheckSevenCheckEight...