Introduction

Recently, we found out that the TC39 committee, which is responsible for the ECMAScript language standard, advanced Optional Chaining to Stage 3 of consideration for inclusion in the standard. This is the second-to-last stage of consideration, so a lot of people got excited about this. Today, I’ll explore Optional Chaining and the problem it solves.

First, the Problem

In JavaScript, accessing properties in objects can be dangerous if we aren’t positive about the object’s structure. Let’s say we have a user object that may or may not have membership information. If we just assume our user has membership information, we can get into trouble.

const user = { name: 'Jen' };
const membershipType = user.membership.type;
// TypeError: Cannot read property 'type' of undefined

There are a couple ways to protect against this happening. We can explicitly check to see if the membership property exists:

let membershipType = undefined;
if (user.membership) {
  membershipType = user.membership.type;
}

Or we can use a short circuit operator that tests whether user.membership exists:

const membershipType = user.membership && user.membership.type;

I prefer the latter approach, but imagine how this looks when you need to drill down several levels:

const membershipTypeName =
  user.membership && user.membership.type && user.membership.type.name;

This starts getting pretty out-of-hand.

So, What is Optional Chaining?

Optional Chaining is essentially shorthand for the latter approach. Let’s rewrite the last snippet using the proposed Optional Chaining approach:

const membershipTypeName = user?.membership?.type?.name;

In this case, we’re letting JavaScript know that we’re not quite sure whether there’s a membership property on user, whether there’s a type property on membership, or whether there’s a name property on type. If any of these checks is untrue, our membershipTypeName variable will end up undefined rather than throwing an error.

Conclusion

There’s quite a bit more to the Optional Chaining proposal, but this is the general idea!