Question

I recently stumpled upon the following warning using PMD (embedded in hudson), my code seems to suffer CollapsibleIfStatements, which I do not fully understand. The code looks like this

// list to be filled with unique Somethingness
List list = new ArrayList();

// fill list
for (SomeObject obj : getSomeObjects()) { // interating 
  if (!obj.getSomething().isEmpty()) { // check if "Something" is empty *
    if (!list.contains(obj.getSomething())) { // check if "Something" is already in my list **
      list.add(obj.getSomething()); // add "Something" to my list
    }
  }
}

In my opinion this code isn’t more “collapsible” (otherwise it would be even more unreadable for the next guy reading the code). On the other hand I want solve this warning (without deactivating PMD ;).

Answer 1

One possibility is to factor out the repeated obj.getSomething() and then collapse the nested if statements:

for (SomeObject obj : getSomeObjects()) {
  Something smth = obj.getSomething();
  if (!smth.isEmpty() && !list.contains(smth)) {
      list.add(smth);
  }
}

To my eye, the result is quite readable, and should no longer trigger the PMD warning.

An alternative is to replace the List with a Set, and avoid the the explicit contains() checks altogether. Using a Set would also have better computational complexity.