As an Ember developer, I can count on fresh features popping up almost every other month within a new release. There are numerous benefits to this, which certainly are out of the scope of this blog post. However, I will briefly cover one particular gem from 2014 - an oldie, but goodie - of a feature.

How many times have you written something like this?

import Ember from 'ember'; const { Component, computed, get } = Ember; export default Component.extend({ farmSentence: computed('animal.species', 'animal.noise', 'farmer.name', 'farmer.location', { get() { let animal = get(this, 'animal'); let farmer = get(this, 'farmer'); return `At ${get(farmer, 'location')}, Farmer ${get(farmer, 'name')} owns a ${get(animal, 'species')} that says "${get(animal, 'noise')}!"`; } }) });

Notice how we consume animal.species , animal.noise , farmer.name , and farmer.location ? There are a lot of shared dependent keys. Gross.

Computed Property Brace Expansion

Well, back in 2014, “brace expansion” was introduced. Let’s use this feature and tidy up our component!

import Ember from 'ember'; const { Component, computed, get } = Ember; export default Component.extend({ farmSentence: computed('animal.{species,noise}', 'farmer.{name,location}', { get() { let animal = get(this, 'animal'); let farmer = get(this, 'farmer'); return `At ${get(farmer, 'location')}, Farmer ${get(farmer, 'name')} owns a ${get(animal, 'species')} that says "${get(animal, 'noise')}!"`; } }) });

Why use Brace Expansion?

Isn’t that much nicer? I prefer using brace expansion, because it organizes the dependent keys and makes it easier to read. Goodness forbid a coworker of yours writes dependent keys without ordering them alphabetically:

... // This ordering isn't ideal farmSentence: computed('animal.noise', 'farmer.name', 'animal.species', 'farmer.location', { get() { let animal = get(this, 'animal'); let farmer = get(this, 'farmer'); return `At ${get(farmer, 'location')}, Farmer ${get(farmer, 'name')} owns a ${get(animal, 'species')} that says "${get(animal, 'noise')}!"`; } }) ...

To those new to Ember, hope you learned something new! And to those experienced in Ember, hope this was a refresher! And to my coworkers that don’t use brace expansions, shame on you!

Thanks for reading.