Visual studio code catching syntax errors

Question

I am using Visual studio code for coding Nodejs. I very strange and annoying that almost everything I write passes until runtime it fails.

For example, I wrote this code

function validateRentalReturn(rental) {
    const schema = Joi.object({
        customerId: Joi.objectId().required,
        movieId: Joi.objectId().required
    });
    return schema.validate(rental);
}

and I forgot to add () at the end of required() and it didn't complain or anything until at run time I called this method and I started getting the following error "movieId" failed custom validation because Cannot read property 'presence' of undefined .

I had no clue about this error but finally got it sorted, in the intellisense it shows like following

Now how should i know that required is a property or a function . Can someone kindly guide how i can get proper Intellisense and error handling for Node js code in VS code.

Answer 1

You might want to use Typescript instead of vanilla Javascript. Its pretty much the same in syntax, but its a typed version of Javascript. Apart from that, a linter is also useful for this kind of things. For typescript you would use TSlint, but you can use ESlint for pure javascript. Hope this helps!