What is an idempotent operation?

Question

What is an idempotent operation?

Answer 1

Just wanted to throw out a real use case that demonstrates idempotence. In JavaScript, say you are defining a bunch of model classes (as in MVC model). The way this is often implemented is functionally equivalent to something like this (basic example):

function model(name) {
  function Model() {
    this.name = name;
  }

  return Model;
}

You could then define new classes like this:

var User = model('user');
var Article = model('article');

But if you were to try to get the User class via model('user'), from somewhere else in the code, it would fail:

var User = model('user');
// ... then somewhere else in the code (in a different scope)
var User = model('user');

Those two User constructors would be different. That is,

model('user') !== model('user');

To make it idempotent, you would just add some sort of caching mechanism, like this:

var collection = {};

function model(name) {
  if (collection[name])
    return collection[name];

  function Model() {
    this.name = name;
  }

  collection[name] = Model;
  return Model;
}

By adding caching, every time you did model('user') it will be the same object, and so it's idempotent. So:

model('user') === model('user');