G'day
This one will be pretty short I think. It's the next effort in going over how these higher-order functions work compared to writing procedural code in CFML tags. I've previous covered map and reduce. There's less intricacy to filter, so I won't have so much to say.
Yesterday I showed an example of how not to remove records from a collection using reduce
numbers = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
evens = numbers.reduce((evens=[], number) => number MOD 2 ? evens : evens.append(number))
This works, but it's not how one ought to do it. It's putting a square peg in a round hole, and it's gonna cause a small amount of FUD when someone comes back to review the code later ("why are they using reduce here? What am I missing?"). So… use the correct tool for the job. The idiomatic way to filter our elements from a collection is with a filter operation. Here's the equivalent operation using filter:
evens = numbers.filter((number) => number MOD 2 == 0)
Filter's callback receive the value of the collection element (and additionally its index/key, as well as the whole collection as additional parameters, if you need to use those too). If the logic in the callback returns true? The element is preserved in the result collection. if it's false? It's filtered out. That's it. The callback logic can be a one-liner like it is here, or as convoluted as it needs to be. As long as it boils down to a true or a false, you'll get your filtered collection. As with the other collection higher-order functions: it does not change the original collection; it returns a new one.
The tag-based equivalent is simple:
<cfset evens = []>
<cfloop array="#numbers#" item="number">
<cfif number MOD 2 EQ 0>
<cfset arrayAppend(evens, number)>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
Just slightly more verbose, and it's mostly boilerplate.
The concept here is simple, and the object of the exercise for these articles is to just show the difference between using the higher-order functions and using a procedural approach with tags, and that's pretty much it.
Righto.
--
Adam
