Code Smell: Variable Initialized inside If-Else Conditional Block

Time to time I find a code with the uninitialized variable declaration before if-else or if-elseif-else statements where the variable is…

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Code Smell: Variable Initialized Inside If-Else Conditional Block

Time to time I find a code with the uninitialized variable declaration before if-else or if-elseif-else statements where the variable is initialized inside the conditional blocks. See the typical example with the full name:

Original Method

Quite often the conditional blocks are even larger giving the developer even less chance to understand what will be the value of the variable after evaluation. There is a very simple solution to this situation which is moving the code inside a separate method:

Extracted Method to Get the Full Name

As we call all the methods on the Person object the method should actually belong to the Person object:

Method Moved into Person Class

And last but not least as no code is executed after the return statement we can reduce the complexity even more:

Method Using Early Returns to Simplify Conditions

References

This topic, especially the last part, is obviously a part of religious wars. The refactorings made above are based on Martin Fowler’s refactorings:

[Replace Nested Conditional with Guard Clauses
refactoring.com

[Replace Temp with Query
refactoring.com

You can also inspect a couple of related articles:

[Local Variables Are Evil (or Just Irritating) - DZone
dzone.com

[Where did the notion of “one return only” come from?
softwareengineering.stackexchange.com

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