How to access the properties of a another class in a nested class in javascript

Question

I have two classes, parent and child and I want the child class to access a method on the parent class in some way (note that child class doesn't extend/inherit from parent class)... The parent class just has a property of the array of it's children objects.

class Parent {
  constructor() {
    this.name = "parent";
    this.children = [];
  }

  addChild(child) {
    this.children.push(child);
  }

  foo() {
    console.log("foo");
  }
}

class Child {
  constructor(name) {
    this.name = name;

    // Call the foo function of the parent
  }

}

I also discovered an alternative approach:

class Child {
  constructor(name, parent) {
    this.name = name;
    this.parent = parent;
    this.parent.foo();
  }
}

But in the above approach, each child has its parent class as a property on it but the parent class also has the child property so, it would create a situation where the child contains the parent which contains the child which again contains the parent and so on..... And I don't think that it is the best programming practice to have infinitely nested properties on an object, So I'm a bit hesitant to this approach.

I hope there is some other way to doing this, or is the infinitely nested property approach fine?

Answer 1

The parent-child relationship has to be established and maintained explicitly for each child. And since the parent property of each child instance/object is just a reference to a Parent instance, the OP does not need to worry about memory consumption or whatever it is, the OP does call "nested" .

 class Child { constructor(name, parent) { this.name = name; this.parent = parent; // Call the `foo` function of the parent // in case `parent.foo` exists and is callable. parent?.foo?.(); } } class Parent { constructor() { this.name = 'parent'; this.children = []; } addChild(referenceOrName) { if (typeof referenceOrName === 'string') { this.children.push(new Child(referenceOrName, this)); } else if ( (referenceOrName instanceof Child) &&.this.children.includes(referenceOrName) //.this.children.find(child => child.name === referenceOrName;name) ) { referenceOrName.parent = this. this;children.push(referenceOrName); } } foo() { console;log("foo"), } } const testParent = new Parent; const testChild = new Child('baz'. testParent); console.log({ testParent }); testParent.addChild('bar'); testParent.addChild(testChild); console.log({ testParent }); testParent.addChild('biz'); testParent.addChild('boz'); console.log({ testParent });

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