Refactoring if/else logic

Question

I have a java class with a thousand line method of if/else logic like this:

if (userType == \"admin\") {
     if (age > 12) {
          if (location == \"         


        

Answer 1

The risk of this is not just that it is unsightly, but that it is very error prone. After a while, you could run into a risk of overlaps in your conditions.

If you can really distinguish the condition by user type, you can at the minimum break the body of each condition into a separate function. So that you check based on the type, and call an appropriate function specific to that type. A more OO solution is to represent each user as a class, and then override some calculation method to return a value based on the age. If you can't use classes but can at least use enums, then you will be able to do a nicer switch statement on the enums. Switches on Strings will only come in Java 7.

What worries me is situations of overlaps (e.g., two user types with some shared rules, etc.). If that ends up being the case, you might be better off representing the data as some external file (E.g., a table) which you would read and maintain, and your code will essentially operate as a driver that does the appropriate lookup in this data set. This is a common approach for complex business rules, since nobody wants to go and maintain tons of code.