By Tim Davis - Director of Development
While we eagerly await the arrival of the npm domino-db module with Domino 10, I thought I would spend this instalment of my blog series on Node.js talking a little about some concepts in JavaScript that are used a lot in Node development. If you haven’t looked at JavaScript much since Domino web forms or XPages SSJS then you may not have come across them. You will see them in examples and articles on Node around the web and will want to use them in your own projects as they will make your life easier when starting out.
JSON
The first is JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON, which I talked about briefly in my blog on NoSQL.
Basically, all the data in Node is JSON. This makes it great for storing in backend NoSQL data stores and for handling in front-end JavaScript frameworks.
JSON is a very readable way of describing data, and it looks like this:
{
"orderNo" : "00101",
"orderLines": [
{ "quantity" : 7 },
{ "quantity" : 11 },
{ "quantity" : 3 }
],
"status": "Invoiced"
}
An object is denoted by the curly brackets { }. An array is denoted by square brackets [ ]. The items inside the object are name-value pairs. Items are separated by commas in both objects and arrays.
You can type this sort of thing directly into your code if you like, but you would normally just get it from somewhere else, like a database.
You reference the object by name and can access or update its properties using dot notation:
currentOrder.status = "Invoiced";
if ( orderLine.quantity > 100 ) {
... your code here ...
}
JSON is hierarchical and you can nest objects inside objects, and arrays inside objects inside arrays, etc, etc. It is a bit like XML in that way, but much easier to read.
You can access nested objects inside arrays inside objects (etc) using dot notation like this:
orders[i].orderLines[j].quantity = 10
JSON arrays are just regular arrays, so you can loop through them:
for ( i = 0; i < currentOrder.orderLines.length; i++ ) {
...
}
One great side effect of JSON being so readable is that it is easily converted to and from strings. Converting to strings is a great way to pass data around between different systems. You can use the built-in JSON object to do this:
JSON.stringify( currentOrder )
JSON.parse( '{ "status":"Invoiced", "orderNo":"00101" }' )
You should use these methods because they handle all the formatting and escaping of special characters for you.
Let and Const
These are two new ways of defining variables in Javascript and you will see them a lot. You will already be familiar with using ‘var’, like this:
var count = 0;
You use ‘let’ and ‘const’ in the same way as ‘var’:
let count = 0;
const domain = "mydomain.com";
‘Let’ and ‘const’ are similar to ‘var’, but they behave in a way that helps you avoid problems in your code.
As you can probably guess, ‘const’ is for constant values that will never change. If you try to set another value you will get an error. This will help prevent you overwriting something important in another part of your code.
What ‘let’ does that is different from ‘var’ is more subtle and is all about the variable’s scope, i.e. where in your code it exists.
If you define a variable using ‘var’, then it exists everywhere inside the enclosing function, i.e. everywhere inside the function you are currently in. This is a very wide area, and it is easy to forget and lose track of variable names and values and get confused. This is especially common when you have lots of loops inside loops inside one function.
With ‘let’, a variable only exists inside the current set of curly brackets, i.e code block. So for example a variable would only exist inside a particular loop and not exist outside in the parent function. This helps avoid all sorts of conflicts and overwriting errors.
Here is an example of how let and var work differently inside and outside curly brackets. Notice how ‘var’ overwrites the value while ‘let’ does not:
let cat = "meow";
var dog = "bark";
console.log("cat "+cat); // will be meow
console.log("dog "+dog); // will be bark
if (true) {
let cat = "scratch";
var dog = "wag";
console.log("cat "+cat); // will be scratch
console.log("dog "+dog); // will be wag
}
console.log("cat "+cat); // will be meow
console.log("dog "+dog); // will be wag
The cat inside the curly brackets is a different cat from the one outside them, but the dog is the same everywhere. This is why the dog gets confused.
Arrow functions
If you read articles on Node or look at code examples, you may have seen functions defined something like this, with the ‘=>’ arrow notation:
( arg1, arg2 ) => { ... }
This is more or less equivalent to
function( arg1, arg2 ) { ... }
The main difference is in how the keyword ‘this’ works.
In a regular function(), when you use ‘this’ it refers to what calls the function. With an arrow function, ‘this’ is from outside what calls the function. This is a pretty arcane distinction, and worth reading up about, but it is very useful in avoiding coding errors.
As an example, when developing in Node you often have functions defined inside methods as callbacks. A callback is a function that is called when a process has finished, usually to go ahead and do something with the results of that process. These usually look something like this:
myOrderDb.getOrders( function( myOrders ) {
... do something with myOrders ...
} );
Here you can see that the parameter in the getOrders method is a function. This is a callback function which is called when getOrders finishes and takes the result, ‘myOrders’, and does something with it.
Consider the following example code. I want my app (i.e. ‘this’) to get records from a database and, when that is done, to update its display:
this.showLoadingMessage();
let myOrdersDb = this.getDb();
myOrdersDb.getOrders( function(myOrders) {
// the following line does not work
this.displayOrders(myOrders);
} );
So what is wrong? I am expecting ‘this’ to refer to my app so I can go ahead and update the app display with the orders, but the ‘this’ inside the function actually points to myOrderDb because it is myOrderDb that is calling the function. The object that ‘this’ refers to gets overwritten inside regular functions. Keeping track of ‘this’ can be a nightmare when you have a complicated series of callbacks and this can be an easy mistake to make.
However, if you use an arrow function then ‘this’ is not overwritten. It is the same inside the function as it was outside it. So an arrow function version of our code would be:
this.showLoadingMessage();
let myOrdersDb = this.getDb();
myOrdersDb.getOrders( (myOrders) => {
this.displayOrders(myOrders);
} );
This is only a small change, but now the ‘this’ inside the function is the app, same as outside it, and my call to the app’s displayOrders method will work. With arrow functions everything behaves much more how you would expect it to.
Next Up
In this post I have touched on callbacks, and next time I plan to expand on this topic and talk in detail about a classic bugbear in JavaScript development, asynchronous functions.
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