LINQ in JavaScript - part 2

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 3 minute read Tags: LINQ JavaScript
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

Recently I did a blog post on my implementation of LINQ in JavaScript which was just talking about a little project I was working on to produce a LINQ-style API within JavaScript.

I had planned to release the source code in that post but due to a problem with my blogs Umbraco install I was unable to.
Well I've finally got around to fixing the media section and now I can provide the code.

I've done a few tweaks within LINQ in JavaScript, and I've added a couple of new operators, Skip, SkipWhile and Take, all providing the same functionality that their .NET counterparts provide.

Lets have a look at the way some of the code works, we'll look at the where method:

Array.prototype.where = function(fn) {
    if (typeof (fn) !== typeof (Function)) throw Error.argumentType("fn", typeof (fn), typeof (Function), "where takes a function to filter on");
    var coll = new Array();
    for (var i = 0; i < this.length; i++) {
        var ret = fn(this[i]);
        if (typeof (ret) !== "boolean") throw Error.argumentType("fn", typeof (ret), typeof (Boolean), "function provided to where much return bool");
        else if (ret) coll.push(this[i]);
    }
    return coll;
}

First off you'll notice that I expect a function to be passed into the method, otherwise how would you apply a where?! As you'll notice I'm doing a lot of type checking as well, the parameter for Where needs to be a function, so I explicitly check it so.
Then it's really just a simple itterator that is used, and pushing each item into a new collection where the provided function returns a boolean value of true.
Again you'll notice type checking, this time of the return value of the function. Because JavaScript isn't compiled, and there is no type checking I have to do it manually (this means that I'm doing a traditional LINQ API, not one where you can return anything you like, ala this post). Not a big problem, but it does add a little overhead.
Sure you can remove it but then it kind-of defeats what I'm trying to achieve, which is a very type-safe API.

 

Ultimately LINQ in JavaScript is nothing more than throught experiment project. It shows that you can quite easily have a client side query language using JavaScript and functional programming.
But I don't recommend that anyone acutally use it. If you're using a client-side query API such as this (or any of the other LINQ implementations for JavaScript) you're doing it wrong. Particularly operators like where, skip, take and even select. These operators are designed to lower/ change the data volume you are working with, which on the client side is not a good idea. It means that you've returned too much data from the server!
I see the only real useful reason for this (other than just wanting to prove it can be done) is to manipulate a DOM structure, say client-side reordering of a table.

But that said anyone who's interested in seeing how it works and having a play yourself you can find the code here.