A day in the life of...

Here is a simple routine that implements what is known as the Elvis Operator in TypeScript. In C# you can write code like this Nullable<int> age = person?.BestFriend?.Mother?.CurrentHusband?.Age); If any of the values along the way it will return a null rather than throwing a NullReferenceException. Using the class in my previous blog  Get a Lambda expression as a string  it is possible to achieve the same in TypeScript using the following format const age = elvisOperator(person, x => x.bestFriend.mother.currentHusband.age; It doesn't currently support anything more than simple property access, so you can't access elements in an array for example. import { Expression } from './expression'; export function isUndefinedOrNull(value: any): boolean { return _.isNull(value) || _.isUndefined(value); } export function elvisOperator (instance: TSource, member: (v: TSource) => TResult): any { let path = Expression.pathAsArray(member); let result...

If, like myself, you prefer as many of your coding mistakes to be identified at compile time as possible then you might like the following example. The FormBuilder in Angular expects us to identify our FormControls with a string name. If ever the API of your server changes then of course the names of those controls will also need to change. So, rather than using magic strings when building a FormGroup I wrote this small utility class for building them against a strongly typed class by using lambda expressions. This routine uses a routine I blogged about recently  ( Get lambda expression as a string) Take the following interface as an example of something we wish to edit in a ReactiveForm. interface Address { line1: string; line2: string; city: string; } The code to build the form would look like this this.form = this.expressionFormBuilder .createFormGroup<Address>() .addFormControl(x => x.line1) .addFormControl(x => x.line2) .addFormContro...