do this without using an “if” | if(s == “value1”){…} else if(s == “value2”) { …}

Question

According to anti-if campaign it is a best practice not to use ifs in our code. Can anyone tell me if it possible to get rid of the if in this piece of code ? (switch is also

Answer 1

Looking at the campaign, it's very poorly explained. There's nothing wrong with ifs, but in certain cases they can indicate that you're not using OOP to its full potential.

What the campaign is trying to promote is increased use of polymorphism in order to decouple calling code from the type of object it is looking at.

You would use some smarter object instead of s being a string:

interface I {
  public String getName();
  public void doSomething();
}

class A implements I {
  public String getName() { return "one"; }
  public void doSomething() { ...; }
}

class B implements I {
  public String getName() { return "two"; }
  public void doSomething() { ...; }
}

Then you can replace the ifs with:

I obj = ...get an A or B from somewhere...;
obj.doSomething();