What is a more elegant solution to these nested if/elseif statements?

Question

I'm building a website that contains users with user profiles. Many of the fields in the profile are optional.

There is an opportunity for a lot of user-generated content, and so I need to display the author of this content in many different locations of the site (comments, posts, etc.). In the user's profile, he is able to (optionally) fill out his "first name", his "last name", and a "display name".

To display the author, I wrote a helper method that looks through a provided array of these fields and returns the most appropriate name for the user, in this order of preference:

1. If the user filled out display_name, this will be displayed.
2. If the user filled out first_name and last_name, but no display_name, it will display both names
3. If the user only filled out first_name, it will display first_name.
4. If the user only filled out last_name, it will display last_name.
5. If all else fails, a user id will be displayed i.e. user123
6. If none of the array keys are present, or the parameter is NULL, the name will display as NULL

The method works great, but it's ugly. There must be a way to beautify this with an alternative to nested if/else statements.

public function nameify($names = NULL) {
    $name = '';
    if (!empty($names)) {
        if (!empty($names['display_name'])) {
            $name = $names['display_name'];
        } elseif (!empty($names['first_name'])) {
            $name = $names['first_name'];
            if (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
                $name .= ' ' . $names['last_name'];
            }
        } elseif (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
            $name = $names['last_name'];
        }

        if (empty($name) && !empty($names['id'])) {
            $name = 'user' . $names['id'];
        } else {
            $name = 'NULL';
        }
    } else {
        $name = 'NULL';
    }
    return $name;
}

Answer 1

It is not much, but because $name it is at least NULL:

public function nameify($names = NULL) {
    $name = 'NULL';
    if (!empty($names)) {
        if (!empty($names['display_name'])) {
            $name = $names['display_name'];
        } elseif (!empty($names['first_name'])) {
            $name = $names['first_name'];
            if (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
                $name .= ' ' . $names['last_name'];
            }
        } elseif (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
            $name = $names['last_name'];
        }

        if ($name=='NULL' && !empty($names['id'])) {
            $name = 'user' . $names['id'];
        } 
    } 
    return $name;
}

Answer 2

I'd go with:

if( empty($names['display_name']) ) {
    $name = $names['first_name'] . ' ' $names['last_name'];
else
    $name = $names['display_name'];

$name = trim($name);
if( empty($name) ) 
    $name = 'user'.$names['id'];
if( empty($name) ) 
    $name = 'NULL';

This would be the 'core logic'... there will need to be other checks like $names != NULL or something..

Answer 3

Using ternary conditions we can shorten and beautify the code:

public function nameify($names = NULL) {
    $name = 'NULL';

    if (!empty($names)) {

        $name = ($names['display_name']) ? $names['display_name'] : trim($names['first_name']." ".$names['last_name']);

        if(!$name) $name = ($names['id'] > 0) ? 'user'.$names['id'] : 'NULL';
    }

    return $name;
}

Answer 4

hi! In pseudocode:

//pointers to functions
$arrayOfSulutions{"display_name_strategy", "full_name_strategy" ..., "null_strategy" } 
function display_name_strategy{
     return $names['display_name'];
}
$i = 0;
while($res == null){
     $res = call($arrayOfSulutions[$i++]);
}

Answer 5

public function nameify($names = NULL) {
    if ($names) {
        if (!empty($names['display_name'])) {
            return $names['display_name'];
        }
        if (!empty($names['first_name'])) {
            $name = $names['first_name'];
        } 
        if (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
            $name .= ' ' . $names['last_name'];
        }
        if (empty($name) && !empty($names['id'])) {
            $name = 'user' . $names['id'];
        }
    }
    return $name ? ltrim($name) : 'NULL';
}

Set the default first, and return that if nothing else matches. Then since we always want to return the display name if we have it do just that.

EDIT: Tweak to prevent returning "NULL "

Answer 6

Somewhat less readable, but effective):

list($idx,$name) = array_shift(array_filter(array(
    $names['display_name'],
    implode(' ',array_filter(array($names['first_name'],$names['last_name']))),
    'user'.$names['id'];
    )));

Answer 7

I would propose this:

public function nameify($names = null) {
    if(empty($names))
        return null;

    if(!empty($names['display_name']))
        return $names['display_name'];

    if(!empty($names['first_name'])) {
        $name = $names['first_name'];
        if (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
            $name .= ' ' . $names['last_name'];
        }
        return $name;
    }

    if(!empty($names['id]))
        return 'user' . $names['id'];

    return null;
}

Answer 8

A State machine works very nicely for involved logic like that. It's very simple to implement as well (using a switch statement).

Answer 9

I'm not sure that my version would be simplier, but here it is:

public function nameify($names = null) {
    $result = array();

    if( !empty($names['display_name']) ) {
        array_push($result,$names['display_name']);
    } else {
        if( !empty($names['first_name']) ) {
            array_push($result, $names['first_name']);
        }
        if( !empty($names['last_name']) ) {
            array_push($result, $names['last_name']);
        }
    }

    if( empty($result) && !empty($names['id']) ) {
        array_push($result, 'user'.$names['id']);
    }

    return (empty($result) ? 'NULL' : implode(' ', $result));
}