Question

I have code that’s very messy with the if – else if checks it is doing. The amount of branching and nested branching is quite big (over 20 if – else if and nested too). It’s making my code harder to read and will probably be a performance hog. My application checks for a lot of conditions it gets from the user and so the application must check all the time for different situations, for example:

If the textbox text is not 0, continue with the next…

if ((StartInt != 0) && (EndInt != 0))   
{

And then here it checks to see whether the user have choosen dates:

if ((datePickerStart.SelectedDate == null) || (datePickerEnd.SelectedDate == null)) 
{
    MessageBox.Show("Please Choose Dates");
}

Here, if the datepickers aren’t null it continues with code…

else if ((datePickerStart.SelectedDate != null) && (datePickerEnd.SelectedDate != null))
{
    // CONDITIONS FOR SAME STARTING DAY AND ENDING DAY.
    if (datePickerStart.SelectedDate == datePickerEnd.SelectedDate)
    {
        if (index1 == index2)
        {
            if (StartInt == EndInt)
            {
                if (radioButton1.IsChecked == true)
                {
                    printTime3();
                }
                else
                {
                    printTime();
                }
            }

This is just a small part of the checks being made. Some of them are functionals and some are for input validation stuff.

Is there any way to make it more readable and less of a performance hog?

Answer 1

It’s not that of a performance hog. A great blog post on how to fix those common problems is Flattening Arrow Code.