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)

Gate Classes

Gate classes is a term I've used to name a certain pattern that I use in certain contexts.

At times, you have code where you don't want the rest of the function to run at all unless certain conditions are met (such as guard clauses):

if(!order.wasCancelled()) {
    // A bunch of code that does stuff.
    if(!order.isFraudlent()) {
        // Some more code.
    }
}

Notice that we have two conditionals (one being nested) and they are not followed by else or else if.

They make one check and act as a gate, as it were, to the rest of the code inside that if statement.

That's why I like to call these kinds of statement gates since they only let the rest of the code run if the gate is opened up.

Scenario

Here's the situation we're going to address. It's similar to the code above, but now we have some repositories that are being used to fetch data to conduct our checks:

const accountIsVerified = await accountRepo.accountIsVerified...