Joel's dev blog

[...].forEach(saveFromZombies) does not always save people

October 12, 2019

⏳ 4 min read

The first encounter with the problem

I was coding as usual.

And I faced an odd encounter with how forEach works.

Here goes the code to give an example of that. Imagine the code below is the code from one of the libaries I was using:

interface IWalkingDead {
  saveFromZombies: (name: string) => void;
  possibility: number;
};

const walkingDead: IWalkingDead = {
  saveFromZombies: function (name) { 
    const msg = Math.random() < this.possibility ? 
      `${name} was succesfully saved by the chance of ${this.possibility}` : 
      `R.I.P ${name} - by the chance of ${this.possibility}`;
        console.log(msg); 
    },
  possibility: 0.5,
}

And I spotted the code in my company’s app that was kind of doing:

> walkingDead.saveFromZombies('Glenn'); // 'R.I.P Glenn - by the chance of 0.5'
> walkingDead.saveFromZombies('Shane'); // 'Shane was succesfully saved by the chance of 0.5'
> walkingDead.saveFromZombies('Lori');  // 'R.I.P Lori - by the chance of 0.5'
> walkingDead.saveFromZombies('Daryl'); // 'Daryl was succesfully saved by the chance of 0.5'

Of course, I did not want this. It’s against DRY principle. So I refactored the code to:

const survivors: Array<string> = ['Glenn', 'Shane', 'Lori', 'Daryl'];
survivors.forEach(options.saveFromZombies);

Cooler and more succinct.

But I was very well tricked into thinking that this would just work. See what this code gave:

// survivors.forEach(options.saveFromZombies) outputs:
'R.I.P Glenn - by the chance of undefined',
'R.I.P Shane - by the chance of undefined',
'R.I.P Lori - by the chance of undefined',
'R.I.P Daryl - by the chance of undefined'

Oops. Everybody’s dead. Ok. Now you are starting to get a grasp of why.

It’s the this binding. Let’s check what this is actually doing inside our code:

const walkingDead: IWalkingDead = {
  saveFromZombies: function (name) { 
    const msg = Math.random() < this.possibility ? 
      `${name} was succesfully saved by the chance of ${this.possibility}` : 
      `R.I.P ${name} - by the chance of ${this.possibility}`;
      console.log(msg);
      console.log(this); // <----- just added this line to check what `this` is doing
    },
  possibility: 0.5,
}

Well, no surprise. It outputs:

...

R.I.P Daryl - by the chance of undefined
Object [global] {
  DTRACE_NET_SERVER_CONNECTION: [Function],
  DTRACE_NET_STREAM_END: [Function],
  DTRACE_HTTP_SERVER_REQUEST: [Function],
  DTRACE_HTTP_SERVER_RESPONSE: [Function],
  DTRACE_HTTP_CLIENT_REQUEST: [Function],
  DTRACE_HTTP_CLIENT_RESPONSE: [Function],
  global: [Circular],
  process:
   process {
     title: 'node',
     version: 'v10.16.0',
     versions:
      { http_parser: '2.8.0',
        node: '10.16.0',
        v8: '6.8.275.32-node.52',
        uv: '1.28.0',
        zlib: '1.2.11',
        brotli: '1.0.7',
        ares: '1.15.0',
        modules: '64',
        nghttp2: '1.34.0',
        
....

Ok. So here’s the main point of this article:

Just passing in the reference of a function that uses this referring to somewhere else than a globalThis, into a forEach might cause an error in javascript because this will point to a global this.

So what do we do? Here are some things to let you know:

1. Explicitly call the function

Yeah this works. This will save some of the guys’ lives.

const survivors: Array<string> = ['Glenn', 'Shane', 'Lori', 'Daryl'];
survivors.forEach((survivor: string) => options.saveFromZombies(survivor));

// outputs:
// R.I.P Glenn - by the chance of 0.5
// ...

Same for the normal function as well:

const survivors: Array<string> = ['Glenn', 'Shane', 'Lori', 'Daryl'];
survivors.forEach( function (survivor: string) { walkingDead.saveFromZombies(survivor) });
// outputs:
// R.I.P Glenn - by the chance of 0.5
// ...

2. Pass thisArg as an argument

These are the parameters for forEach:

arr.forEach(callback(currentValue [, index [, array]])[, thisArg]);

You can put in the object to be pointed to as this inside saveFromZombies.

const survivors: Array<string> = ['Glenn', 'Shane', 'Lori', 'Daryl'];
survivors.forEach(options.saveFromZombies, walkingDead);

// outputs:
// Glenn was succesfully saved by the chance of 0.5
// ...

3. Use bind

This is an explicit binding. You tell the javascript engine that you want saveFromZombies to be bound to walkingDead object.

const survivors: Array<string> = ['Glenn', 'Shane', 'Lori', 'Daryl'];
survivors.forEach(walkingDead.saveFromZombies.bind(walkingDead));

// outputs:
// R.I.P Glenn - by the chance of 0.5
// ...

Further..

Of course, we can, and should apply the same principle when dealing with map, filter, … and more.

Summary

  • We have looked at how this might lose context when we put a reference of a function as a callback to forEach.
  • The solutions are: (1) Explicitly call the function, (2) Pass thisArg as an argument, and (3) Use bind.

Happy forEach coding!

Written by Joel Mun. Joel likes Typescript, React, Node.js, GoLang, Python, Wasm and more. He also loves to enlarge the boundaries of his knowledge, mainly by reading books and watching lectures on Youtube. Guitar and piano are necessities at his home.

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