Introduction to Optional Chaining Operator

With the recent release of Nodejs v14, it comes with the newly upgraded Javascript engine: v8.1. One of the things worth mentioning is optional chaining.

This post introduces you to the optional chaining operator and how you can use it to make your code looks cleaner and neater.

Example of optional chaining.

peopleA?.name?.firstName

One of the main problems I encountered in writing Javascript is when we have nested objects, we were required to write a long if statement. Given the code below.

const peopleA = { name: { firstName: 'Tek Loon', lastName: 'Cheah', } } // If we want to access first name, this is the validation required if (peopleA && peopleA.name) { const fname = peopleA.name.firstName; console.log(`First name is ${fname}`); // Output: First name is Tek Loon }

Refer to the code above, if we wanted to access firstName in the object, we would have to perform null & undefined checking on peopleA and name nested object.

We would probably end up with most common error, where we trying to access the property of undefined or null.

Cannot read property 'firstName' of undefined

With optional chaining introduced, we can now write cleaner and shorter code.

const peopleA = { name: { firstName: 'Tek Loon', lastName: 'Cheah', } } // Validation in single line const fname = peopleA?.name?.firstName; console.log(`First name is ${fname}`); // Output: First name is Tek Loon

Conclusion

Optional chaining allows us to organize our code cleaner by reducing if statement. I am glad it released in Node v14.

Thanks for reading.