I am working with an Angular app where the api response can be missing some expected data.
This can crash the app and an easy fix has been to use Optional-chaining;
foo.bar.baz => foo.bar?.baz
Is there a setting or way to treat all '.' as '?.' and would this be a bad idea for any reason?
As far as i went through the official Angular & Typescript docs, There is no such option. And there shouldn't be.
Its definitely a bad idea. This will result in "Silent" bugs, that will be hard to find as the system grows.
e.g. if you have the following model:
interface ContactInfoDTO {
email: string;
phone: string;
}
interface UserDTO {
name: string;
contactInfo: ContactInfoDTO;
}
And you assume that every user in the system should have a valid contact info. When you access the email property user?.contactInfo?.email, you could end up with a bug, not knowing that something is actually wrong with your data, since no error was thrown.
Use Optional-chaining carefully, only where you know that some data might not be defined for a reason.
There is a nice article on the matter: https://medium.com/@a.hafez852/is-optional-chaining-really-a-good-addition-to-javascript-e4bbbc31909f