Eliminating Switch() Statements - A Dynamic [Elegant] Approach
Script developers are quick to reach for the Switch() directive in javascript. This is considered better than IF() statements for many reasons, but this is not specific to Airtable scripting; Switch() is used in all flavours of javascript and it’s a bit faster than evaluating IF() statements.
But just as Switch() is a better alternative to IF(), JSON may be a better alternative to Switch().
Consider the requirements of my Benford’s example.
- Traverse every record to capture the first digit in the values of a target numeric field.
- Count the instances where the first digit is 1 through 9.
This is a simple aggregation and one might perform the classification of the counts using a Switch() statement - one case for each count. This requires - among other things, ten variables to accumulate the counts and a Switch() statement to perform the counts. No engineer could be blamed for concluding this approach.
Alternative…
The alternative is just one variable; a JSON object that will ultimately contain the 10 classes of counts defined like this:
let benfordCounts = {};
Iterating across 30,000 records and aggregating while classifying the counts requires just one line of code.
benfordCounts[thisDigit] = (benfordCounts[thisDigit] === undefined) ? {"count" : 1} : {"count" : benfordCounts[thisDigit].count + 1};
When the dust settles (in about 1200 milliseconds) it leaves us with this object which looks a lot like a Switch() statement, right? But, unlike a Switch() statement, it is portable, searchable, can be evaluated, and even embellished with new data.
We tend to assume JSON objects are simply for data payloads, but they can be employed in a variety of ways to enhance code and in many cases eliminate lots of code while creating simple approaches that perform very fast.
