Tuesday, 8 August 2017

Complex object creation in JavaScript

In JavaScript you can get a little spoilt with the initialisation of variables. For example I might have something like this:

const start = {
    "x": 20,
    "y": 20
}, end = {
    "x": 40,
    "y": 60
}, width = end.x - start.x, height = end.y - start.y;

Where width and height rely on the previously set variables.

Today, at work, I was asked if there was a way of doing something similar regarding initializing an object. This pseudo code illustrates what I mean:

const psuedoObj = {
    "start": [20, 20],
    "end": [40, 60],
    "width": this.end[0] - this.start[0],
    "height": this.end[1] - this.start[1],
};

console.log(psuedoObj);

The thing is, that doesn't work.

So we got to looking and found this answer on Stack Overflow. To get around the issue we could then do this:

const psuedoObj = {
    "start": [20, 20],
    "end": [40, 60],
    "init": function(){
        this.x = this.start[0];
        this.y = this.start[1];
        this.width = this.end[0] - this.start[0],
        this.height = this.end[1] - this.start[1],
        delete this.init
        return this;
    }
}.init();

console.log(psuedoObj);

Nice ehh? And we even tidy up after ourselves!

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