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Reducing Code Nesting

  Eric Florenzano        2012-01-02 08:13:46       3,162        0    

"This guy’s code sucks!" It’s something we’ve all said or thought when we run into code we don’t like. Sometimes it’s because it’s buggy, sometimes it’s because it conforms to a style we don’t like, and sometimes it’s because it just feels wrong. Recently I found myself thinking this, and automatically jumping to the conclusion that the developer who wrote it was a novice. The code had a distinct property that I dislike: lots of nesting. But the more I think about it, the more I realized that it’s not really something I’ve heard discussed much.

So let’s talk about it. I’m going to first talk about what I mean by nesting, why I think it’s a bad quality, and then I’m going to go over some tricks I’ve learned over the years to reduce it.

What do I mean by code nesting, and why is it bad?

It’s easier to demonstrate rather than talk about it. This is what I mean by deep code nesting, with my apologies for the contrived example:

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def get_cached_user(user_id=None, username=None):
    """
    Returns a cached user object either by their user_id or by their username.
    """
    user = cache.get_user_by_id(user_id)
    if not user:
        user = cache.get_user_by_username(username)
        if not user:
            user = db.get_user_by_id(user_id)
            if not user:
                user = db.get_user_by_username(username)
                if not user:
                    raise ValueError('User not found')
            cache.set_user(user, id=user.id, username=user.username)
    return user

You can see in this Python code just by looking at the indentation level that there’s lots of nesting. Before we can determine that the user was not found, we must pass through four conditionals, and each conditional is nested within the previous conditional.

I argue that this is bad code. Every added level of nesting is another piece of context that your brain has to keep track of. Each nested block is one you have to line up by eye to see what conditional it lines up with (even if your editor helps at this with visuals, it doesn’t remove the issue entirely.) And this is just a straightforward example where we just return the user at the end, let’s take a look at an example that does something more complicated:

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def get_media_details(media):
    """
    Returns a dictionary of extra data about the given media object.
    """
    data = {}
    if media.is_video:
        data['kind'] = 'video'
        if media.is_youtube:
            data['url'] = 'http://youtube.com/'
        if media.is_vimeo:
            data['vimeo'] = True
            if media.vimeo_version == 2:
                data['url'] = 'http://vimeo.com/v2/'
        if 'url' in data:
            data['secure_url'] = data['url'].replace('http:', 'https:')
    elif media.is_audio:
        data['kind'] = 'audio'
    elif media.is_text:
        data['kind'] = 'text'
    if 'kind' in data:
        data['kind_verbose'] = {
            'video': 'Video Stream',
            'audio': 'Audio File',
            'text': 'Text Content',
        }[data['kind']]
    return data

It was unbelievably hard for me to even write that last example. It’s obviously contrived and such, but the point is that it’s so difficult to even understand what it’s doing. Unlike the previous example, this doesn’t simply nest and then return; it nests and then un-nests, and then nests again, and then finally returns.

How to Avoid Nesting

The best way that I’ve discovered to avoid nesting is to return early. Caching is the perfect example of this. Instead of testing for a cache failure and fetching from the database inside the conditional, check for cache success and return that early.

So this code:

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def get_cached_user(user_id):
    user = cache.get_user_by_id(user_id)
    # The main logic all happens in this nested block
    if not user:
        user = db.get_user_by_id(user_id)
        cache.set_user_for_id(user_id, user)
    return user

Becomes this:

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def get_cached_user(user_id):
    user = cache.get_user_by_id(user_id)
    if user:
        return user
    # The main logic happens outside of the nested block
    user = db.get_user_by_id(user_id)
    cache.set_user_for_id(user_id, user)
    return user

In the simple case, it doesn’t seem to improve much, but what happens if we apply this technique to our first example? It’s dramatically improved:

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def get_cached_user(user_id, username):
    # First check the cache by id
    user = cache.get_user_by_id(user_id)
    if user:
        return user

    # Now check the cache by username
    user = cache.get_user_by_username(username)
    if user:
        return user

    # Both caches failed, so try hitting the db for the id
    user = db.get_user_by_id(user_id)
    if user:
        cache.set_user(user, id=user.id, username=user.username)
        return user

    # Looks like that didn't exist, try the username
    user = db.get_user_by_username(username)
    if not user:
        raise ValueError('User not found')

    # Cache our final user value for future use
    cache.set_user(user, id=user.id, username=user.username)
    return user

Not only does it make it easier to read top-to-bottom, and force us to keep track of way less context, and make our code editors do less line wrapping, but it also makes it easier to separate the blocks of code and more easily comment them.

So what other techniques can we use? It starts to depend more on the situation. Are you nesting because you’re writing a bunch of callbacks? If so, you can usually restructure your code to use named functions instead of anonymous functions. Here’s how that would might look before refactoring:

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function getCachedUser(userId, callback) {
    cache.getUser(userId, function(user) {
        if(user) {
            return callback(user);
        }
        db.getUser(userId, function(user) {
            cache.setUser(userId, user, function() {
                callback(user);
            });
        });
    });
}

Note that in this example we even applied the technique of returning early in the first callback function, but as you can see there’s still a bunch of nesting going on. Now if we switch to using named functions?

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function curry(fn) {
    var slice = Array.prototype.slice;
    var args = slice.apply(arguments, [1]);
    return function () {
        return fn.apply(null, args.concat(slice.apply(arguments)));
    };
}

function final(callback, user) {
    callback(user);
}

function dbResult(callback, userId, user) {
    cache.setUser(userId, user, curry(final, callback, user));
}

function cacheResult(callback, userId, user) {
    if(user) {
        return callback(user);
    }
    db.getUser(userId, curry(dbResult, callback, userId));
}

function getCachedUser(userId, callback) {
    cache.getUser(userId, curry(cacheResult, callback, userId));
}

This is a lot better in terms of nesting. Unfortunately we had to write a helper function called curry, but that only has to be written once and can be re-used for all code written in this style. Also unfortunately I still find this kind of code difficult to follow, which is why I avoid writing much callback-style code. However, at least you can reduce the nesting. In all honesty, there are probably better ways of reducing nesting that I’m not aware of. If you can rewrite the getCachedUser function in JS in a better way, please blog it!

Another way to reduce nesting is to assign an intermediate variable. Here’s an example in Erlang of some file function that nests a case statement within another case statement.

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do_some_file_thing(File) ->
    case file:open(File, [raw, binary, read]) of
        {ok, Fd} ->
            Start = now(),
            case process_file_data(Fd) of
                {ok, Processed} ->
                    {ok, Start, now(), Processed};
                Error ->
                    Error
            end;
        Error ->
            Error
    end.

We can assign to an intermediate "Resp" variable, and bring that second case statement out into the function’s main code block, like so:

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do_some_file_thing(File) ->
    Resp = case file:open(File, [raw, binary, read]) of
        {ok, Fd} ->
            {timestamp, now(), process_file_data(Fd)};
        Error ->
            Error
    end,
    case Resp of
        {timestamp, Start, {ok, Processed}} ->
            {ok, Start, now(), Processed};
        {timestamp, Start, Error} ->
            Error;
        Error ->
            Error
    end.

What does this all mean?

At the end of the day, this isn’t going to make or break you as a programmer. In fact, nothing I’ve mentioned even changes the code’s logic, but simply its implementation. It’s simply something to think about as you code, as you read other people’s code. Hopefully you agree with me that less nesting is an admirable goal, and you find more and more ways to achieve it.

Source : http://eflorenzano.com/blog/2012/01/01/reducing-code-nesting/

MAINTAINABILITY  CODE NESTING  READABILITY  REDUCTION 

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