I would certainly rather see this than {isAdmin: bool; isLoggedIn: bool}. With boolean | null, at least illegal states are unrepresentable... even if the legal states are represented in an... interesting way.

E: omg forget my whole comment. I agree with you that the name sucks.

I mostly don't like that role is typically an intuitive name, and now suddenly it means something I wouldn't expect. Why add confusion to your code? I don't always remember what I meant week to week, much less if someone else wrote it.

The variable name is 90% why this is so unreasonable. Code is for humans to read, so names matter.

Product manager: "I want a new role for users that can only do x,y,z"

Developer: "uh.. yeah. About that... Give me a few days."

Yeah let’s use a union of a boolean and null to represent role, something that inherently represents more than two (…or three, I guess) different values, as opposed to something like an integer.

Even if the name is clearly misleading in this specific case, the entire choice of using a bool here is just bad because it’s almost guaranteed you’re going to expand on that in future and then you’ll just have to entirely rewrite the logic because it simply can’t accommodate more than two values (or three with the null union… 🙈), while it gives absolute zero benefits over using something more reasonable like an integer to represent the roles, or in this case, admin, not-admin and guest. Even if you’ll end up with just admin, non-admin and guest, the integer would still work great with no disadvantages in terms of amount of code or whatever. Just increased legibility and semantical accuracy.

Not to mention that there’s zero reason to combine the state of being logged in and the role in which you’re logged in in one variable… those are two different things. They will remain two different things in future too…

I mean they’re already chaining elseifs (basically matching/switching, while doing it in an inefficient way to boot 🥴) as though there were an n amount of possible states. Why not just make it make sense from the start instead of whatever the hell this is?

tristate as in three states or tristate as in five states?

Classic checkbox values

Troof

I mean facts. Facts is what the kids say. Facts.

There are several small details that PHP won't allow, but It's valid Javascript and it's the kind of thing you may find on that language.

if it's 'FILE_NOT_FOUND' then the string will be read as truthy and you will get 'User is admin' logged.

That's TypeScript. I can tell by the pixels defining a type above.

root access

a === b returns true if a and b have the same type and are considered equal, and false otherwise. If a is null and b is a boolean, it will simply return false.

The only flaw is that the console.log states that null means user is not logged in.

If there are three or more explicit states, you should not use a nullable bool, but some more explicit data structure, like enum.

For example, if the state comes from a db, the user could be successfully logged in, but somehow for a range of possible reasons this variable ends up as null and you'll have a hell of a time debugging, because the log will give you nonsense.

It's JS, so about 5, I think.

Edit: Looks like TypeScript, but the same applies.

The === is the best! I want to know they're really the same and not just evaluate the the same.

Afaik with three it also requires the types to be equal. Like 0 == false, but 0 !== false, because they're different types.