Give an array a value and a list inside of it

Question

I wish to make a list inside of an item in an array but still keep a value for that item? Is there any way of doing that?

resources: {
        hyphens: 0{
            rate: 0
        },
        ores: 0,
        pitchforks: 0

I want resources.hyphens to give back a number since I have that referenced quite a bit in my other file as such. But I also wish to be able to recall a value from something such as resources.hyphens.rate that is seeded in resources.hyphens . Any way of doing that?

Answer 1

You can create toString and valueOf methods as own properties to an object. These methods are used when ever JS needs to convert an object to a string or to a number. Usually you have seen them returning "[object Object]", but for example an instance of Date will return a date string when converted to a string.

Creating own conversion methods:

var resources = {
    hyphens: {
        rate: 5
    },
    ores: 0,
    pitchforks: 0
};

Object.defineProperties(resources.hyphens, {
    valueOf: {value: function () {return 10;}},
    toString: {value: function () {return 10;}}
});

A live demo at jsFiddle .

You can create these properties also within the object definition, but doing it this way will protect the properties, and make them also non-enumerable.

Notice, that logging resources.hyphens directly, will show you the object structure, in the code it will behave like a number in a case a conversion is needed.