Missed ternary opportunity¶
ID: cs/missed-ternary-operator
Kind: problem
Security severity:
Severity: recommendation
Precision: high
Tags:
- maintainability
- language-features
Query suites:
- csharp-security-and-quality.qls
Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository
An if statement where both branches do nothing but return or write to a variable can be difficult to read. It takes up a lot of lines of code and, in the case of assignment, requires the declaration of the variable to be on a different line to the two assignments. It also does not adequately express the intent of the programmer to assign or return a value based on a condition.
Recommendation¶
This pattern can be better expressed using the ternary (?) operator. This solves all the above problems by making shorter code that is easier to read and better expresses the intent of the programmer.
Example¶
In this example the if statement controls only what is returned by the method.
class MissedTernaryOpportunity
{
static int MyAbs(int x)
{
if (x >= 0)
return x;
else
return -x;
}
}
It could be expressed a lot more simply using the ternary operator.
class MissedTernaryOpportunityFix
{
static int MyAbs(int x)
{
return x >= 0 ? x : -x;
}
}