FAQ: Union Types - Unions with Literal Types

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This community-built FAQ covers the “Unions with Literal Types” exercise from the lesson “Union Types”.

Paths and Courses
This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Learn TypeScript

FAQs on the exercise Unions with Literal Types

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2

Hey! Thanks for the tutorial it’s great :smile: I was wondering though, why don’t we use enum on this particular example? Would it be the same thing or is there an advantage to using Union with literal types?

6 Likes
3

I found some articles about the differences between enums and unions with literal types:

1 Like
4

The “if” statments and console.log() calls, repeat themselves 3 times, yet they are shorter than writing a “switch” statment.

When do we opt for concise yet repetitive code and when for longer DRY code?

For example writing this excersise like this:

type Status = “idle” | “downloading” | “complete”;

const downloadStatus = (status: Status) => {

let message: string = ‘’;

switch (status) {
case “idle”:
message = “Download”;
break;
case “downloading”:
message = “Downloading…”
break;
case “complete”:
message = “Your download is complete!”
break;
}

console.log(message);

}

downloadStatus(“idle”);
downloadStatus(“downloading”);
downloadStatus(“complete”);

Thanks.

5

I also decided to remember and use switch for the purpose of training. It will not pass the test from Codecademy - it requires the if( ) syntax. But overall, this code works great:

  switch(status){
    case 'idle': console.log('Download'); break;
    case 'downloading': console.log('Downloading...'); break;
    case 'complete': console.log('Your download is complete!'); break;
  }