Question

I have a history in programming, but not much in software development. I’m currently writing a piece of software for the company I work at, and I’ve come to challenge myself on the readability of my code.

I want to know whether this is a “valid” alternative to embedded if statements, or if there is anything better I could use.

Let’s say I have the following method:

public void someMethod()
{
    if (some condition)
    {
        if (some condition 2)
        {
            if (some condition 3)
            {
                // ...etc all the way until:
                doSomething();
            }
            else
            {
                System.err.println("Specific Condition 3 Error");
            }
        }
        else
        {
            System.err.println("Specific Condition 2 Error");
        }
    }
    else
    {
        System.err.println("Specific Condition 1 Error");
    }
}

Now the first thing I should point out is that in this instance, combining the conditions (with &&) isn’t possible, since each one has a unique error that I want to report, and if I combined them I wouldn’t be able to do that (or would I?). The second thing I should point out before anyone screams “SWITCH STATEMENT!” at me is that not all of these conditions can be handled by a switch statement; some are Object specific method calls, some are integer comparisons, etc.

That said, is the following a valid way of making the above code more readable, or is there a better way of doing it?

public void someMethod()
{
    if (!some condition)
    {
        System.err.println("Specific Condition 1 Error");
        return;
    }

    if (!some condition 2)
    {
        System.err.println("Specific Condition 2 Error");
        return;
    }

    if (!some condition 3)
    {
        System.err.println("Specific Condition 3 Error");
        return;
    }

    doSomething();
}

So basically, instead of checking for conditions and reporting errors in else blocks, we check for the inverse of the condition and return if it is true. The result should be the same, but is there a better way of handling this?

Answer 1

If I was being particularly pedantic I would use something like this.

boolean c1, c2, c3;

public void someMethod() {
  boolean ok = true;
  String err = "";

  if (ok && !(ok &= c1)) {
    err = "Specific Condition 1 Error";
  }

  if (ok && !(ok &= c2)) {
    err = "Specific Condition 2 Error";
  }

  if (ok && !(ok &= c3)) {
    err = "Specific Condition 3 Error";
  }

  if ( ok ) {
    doSomething();
  } else {
    System.out.print(err);
  }
}

You are now single-exit AND flat.

Added

If &= is difficult for you, use something like:

  if (ok && !c3) {
    err = "Specific Condition 3 Error";
    ok = false;
  }