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The process of nullity checking can be a cumbersome one, but it helps to ensure that your app doesn't break and visitors don't start running in the opposite direction.

JavaScript is constantly evolving and so are the syntax and ways to deal with common problems.

One such evolvation (not a word, maybe evolution?) is a relatively new and definitely shorter and less verbose way with a tastier syntax of conducting the nullity task and it is called the optional chaining.

Optional chaining will reduce the number of lines of code, improve readability and bring joy with every nullity check you will do. You may even get addicted to doing nullity checks, though there are times when you should use them sparingly. 🤭 (I will get to that in a minute).

That said, here's how to use optional chaining.

. Because if either one of those would be 

Pretty insane amount of code for declaring one variable, right? And this is given that our object is super simple; imagine the struggle with a large, deeply nested object, ohhhh, boy... I used to do it all day - every day.

Now here's the same code with optional chaining:

However, as with everything; here it comes...

You may want to think before spraying the optional chaining all over your code.

Sometimes we may actually want the app to break if something is missing. There could be a number of reasons for that which I will not describe now but feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. In this case, if we have optional chaining "safeguarding" every variable declaration and condition, we may quickly lose track of where things went wrong.

From the above example, let's say, we may want to ensure that  

 is optional in which case we could omit the optional chaining operator from that layer of the data object, like so:

This way we can be sure that if for whatever reason 

 was lost in translation, that part of the app will throw an error, and assuming you have set up proper error boundaries and error reporting, you will quickly find out about the problem.

Learn a better way to conduct nullity checks in your JavaScript apps, meet - optional chainin

Optional chaining - a better way to do nullity checks in JavaScript

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