Accessing Nested Objects in JavaScript

tldr; safely access nested objects in JavaScript in a super cool way.

JavaScript is amazing, we all know that already. But a few things in JavaScript are really weird and they make us scratch our heads a lot. One of those things is the confrontation with this error when you try to access a nested object,

Cannot read property 'foo' of undefined

Most of the times when we're working with JavaScript, we'll be dealing with nested objects and often we'll be needing to access the innermost nested values safely.

Let's take this nested object as an example.

const user = {
    id: 101,
    email: '[e-mail]',
    personalInfo: {
        name: 'Jack',
        address: {
            line1: 'westwish st',
            line2: 'washmasher',
            city: 'wallas',
            state: 'WX'
        }
    }
}

To access the name of the our user, we'll write

const name = user.personalInfo.name;
const userCity = user.personalInfo.address.city;

This is easy and straight-forward.

But, for some reason, if our user's personal info is not available, the object structure will be like this,

const user = {
    id: 101,
    email: '[e-mail]'
}

Now if you try you access the name, you'll be thrown Cannot read property 'name' of undefined.

const name = user.personalInfo.name; // Cannot read property 'name' of undefined

This is because we're trying to access name key from an object that does not exist.

The usual way how most devs deal with this scenario is,

const name = user && user.personalInfo ? user.personalInfo.name : null;
// undefined error will NOT be thrown as we check for existence before access

This is okay if your nested structure is simple, but if you have your data nested 5 or 6 levels deep, then your code will look really messy like this,

let city;
if (
    data && data.user && data.user.personalInfo &&
    data.user.personalInfo.addressDetails &&
    data.user.personalInfo.addressDetails.primaryAddress
   ) {
    city = data.user.personalInfo.addressDetails.primaryAddress;
}

There are a few tricks to deal with this messy object structures.

Oliver Steele's Nested Object Access Pattern

This is my personal favorite as it makes the code look clean and simple. I picked this style from stackoverflow a while back and it is pretty catchy once you understand how it works.

const name = ((user || {}).personalInfo || {}).name;

With this notation, you'll never run into Cannot read property 'name' of undefined. You basically check if user exists, if not, you create an empty object on the fly. This way, the next level key will always be accessed from an object that exists or an empty object, but never from undefined.

Unfortunately, you cannot access nested arrays with this trick

Access Nested Objects Using Array Reduce

Array reduce method is very powerful and it can be used to safely access nested objects.

const getNestedObject = (nestedObj, pathArr) => {
    return pathArr.reduce((obj, key) =>
        (obj && obj[key] !== 'undefined') ? obj[key] : undefined, nestedObj);
}

// pass in your object structure as array elements
const name = getNestedObject(user, ['personalInfo', 'name']);

// to access nested array, just pass in array index as an element the path array.
const city = getNestedObject(user, ['personalInfo', 'addresses', 0, 'city']);
// this will return the city from the first address item.

Typy

If you think the above methods are a lil' too mainstream, then you should try Typy library that I've written. In addition to safely accessing nested objects, it does many more awesome things. 🎉

It is available as an npm package - Typy

If you use Typy, your code will look like this,

import t from 'typy';

const name = t(user, 'personalInfo.name').safeObject;
const city = t(user, 'personalInfo.addresses[0].city').safeObject;
// address is an array

Edit: There a few other libraries like Lodash and Ramda that can do this. But in light-weight front-end projects, especially if you're going to need only one or two methods from those libs, it's a good idea to opt for an alternative light-weight lib, or better, write your own.

Happy 'safely accessing nested objects in JavaScript'! 💥

Comments

[Wes]

or github.com/tc39/proposal-optional-..., in future...

[Will Stone]

I have been looking forward to this a lot; checking the site on a near-weekly basis to see if it has progressed a stage

[Dinesh Pandiyan]

It'll be great to see this operator soon in ES. I like the way how ES is progressing forward.

[Martin Häusler]

It's a GOOD thing that you get this error from JS! It tells you that something in your program and/or your data is wrong. By coding like this, you may circumvent the error message, but the root cause still exists. Use Typescript instead. It will tell you exactly when it is safe to navigate nested structures and when it is not. In the latter case, you should HANDLE the error, not ignore it.

[Dinesh Pandiyan]

I agree TypeScript is safe and provides great many flexibilities in handling unexpected code.

But the alternate without a typescript (preference differs) would be to catch all these in a try catch block throughout the code, which will look really messy in a huge codebase. Sometimes, missing data in nested structures might be intentional too, mostly because JS is weakly typed. I think handling all those errors is a little too much effort and rather we should focusing on coding for the problem and let utils/libs handle the language shortcomings.

[Itachi Uchiha]

I use extract method for my project. Purpose can be different. These codes from my localization project on Github.

github.com/aligoren/local.js/blob/...

 extract(propertyName, object) {
        const parts = propertyName.split(".");
        let length = parts.length;
        let i;
        let property = object || this;

        for (i = 0; i < length; i++) {
            property = property[parts[i]];
        }

        return property;
    }

Usage:

const locals = {
    "tr": {
        "btn": {
            "welcome": {
                "text": "Merhaba hoşgeldin"
            },
            "other": "Diğeri"
        }
    },
    "en": {
        "btn": {
            "welcome": {
                "text": "Hi Welcome"
            },
            "other": "Other"
        }
    }
}

this.extract('btn.welcome.text', locals['tr'])

[Dinesh Pandiyan]

This is great and easily readable. Maybe we should benchmark all the ways to access nested objects and spread the word so the community will know which one to use and when.

[Carlos Núñez]

Take a look at i18n library, works in this way.

[Xing Wang]

or get from Lodash.

[Dinesh Pandiyan]

Lodash is all too awesome and there's nothing you can't do in Lodash. I'm a big fan of it. But sometimes, in a few light-weight front-end codebases, I find Lodash to be heavy and prefer to write the util on my own, especially if I'll be needing only one or two methods from Lodash.

[Cristian Pallarés]

You can install any lodash method in isolation for that case. If you're bundling your assets, you can install lodash and load just the parts you need.

[Jerome Olvera]

Lodash get all the things 🙌🙌🙌

[Alexander Klimetschek]

Here is a simpler self-contained helper function:

function resolve(obj, path) {
    return path.split('.').reduce((o, key) => o && o[key], obj);
}

resolve(user, 'personalInfo.name');
resolve(user, 'personalInfo.addresses.0.city');

Note the dot notation, also works for arrays with index addressing.

[Darren Vong]

Some very nice solutions - I'm totally with you on writing your own util functions when it's small things, considering the impact from libraries like left-pad had when it was taken down! This will solve a lot of headache of nested property access until the optional/elvis operator becomes a thing in JS. Thanks for sharing!

[Vadim K.]

What about this?

function grab(fn, defaultValue) {
  try {
    const value =  fn();
    return value;
  } catch (err) {
    return defaultValue;
  }
}

// and then

const city = grab(() => user.personalInfo.address.city);

[Vadim K.]

Ah, default value doesn't make sense here, so

function grab(accessor) {
 try {
   const value = accessor();
   return value;
 } catch(err) {
   return;
 }
}

[Kushan Joshi]

Instead of reinventing wheel, I highly suggest looking at lenses randycoulman.com/blog/2016/07/12/t...

[Dinesh Pandiyan]

I am a big fan of Lodash and have heard a great deal about Ramda too. But most of the time I find myself working on a small project that doesn't need 99% of the utils in these libraries, especially on the front-end. In those cases, I prefer to either write the util on my own or use a micro library that works for my project. But anyway thanks for letting me know about lenses. This looks pretty interesting and I'm going to take a closer look at how it works internally.

[Michael Brown]

import _get from "lodash/get";

[Leah]

github.com/developit/dlv

How about something actually tiny?

[Dinesh Pandiyan]

This is amazing. Concise and clean.

Do you want to be able to support arrays in string path? I can create a PR. But the code won't be as small though.

[Amine Hammou]

thank you!