Control Flow via Return vs. If/Else [closed]

Answer 1

Exit early - I prefer to see all the conditions that will cause the method to exit without doing much up front. I avoid else statements if I can at all avoid it.

This is actually a fairly prominent school of thought among the Code Contracts crowd.

Answer 2

I personally like the if/else approach. For one, your if statement is a positive, not a negative, making it easier to read. For two, you've encapsulated the conditions in curly brackets, and I'm a fan of that style.

Anyway, it's much easier to follow what's going on in the second than in the first. And that always wins in my book.

Answer 3

I also prefer option 1. For me, it reads better like a book. Also I'm always pained by there not being a return at the end of option 2.

Answer 4

I prefer the first option, provided the case you check is a guard/precondition that needs to be met for the method call to be valid. Although you could argue if you should return null, or throw an (Argument)Exception. When a class isn't editable, should it really be a parameter for this method?

Maybe a better option would be to create an IEditable interface and implementing this on the class you're passing an instance of right now.

Answer 5

There's not much difference in this specific example, but in general I like the first approach because it uses a guard clause to return early. If you start adding nested conditions to the second approach you'll see that your code readability will suffer. Guard clauses can go a long way toward reducing the nesting depth, and really enhance the readability of your code.

Answer 6

They are both valid options, and one isn't necessarily any better than the other. Which one you choose is, ultimately, personal preference. Yes, Option A results in slightly less code, but overall they are pretty much equal.

In both cases you are controlling flow via an if and a return. It's really a question of how you prefer to see your boolean logic - negative or positive?

Is ActionResult an enum or a base class? If it's an enum, why are you returning null when Edit returns what appears to be an enum? Wouldn't it be cleaner simply to return an ActionResult value that indicates no action was taken because the object wasn't in an editable state?