Meal Maker problem

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#1

My meal maker keeps returning ‘undefined’. So I started to look through the individual elements of my object to see where the problem may lie. First of all I checked console.log(menu._courses); to see if my functions for adding dishes worked. All was fine

And then I tried console.log(menu.getRandomDishFromCourse(menu._courses.appetizers)) to see if .getRandomDishFromCourse worked, and it didn’t it turned out.

Originally I had written the method like this
getRandomDishFromCourse(courseName) { const dishes = this._courses[courseName]; return dishes[Math.floor(Math.random() * dishes.length)];

I checked the walkthrough video and figured that perhaps I should have broken it down a bit by using variables so now the method looks like this:

getRandomDishFromCourse(courseName) { const dishes = this._courses[courseName]; const randomIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * dishes.length) return dishes[randomIndex]; },

But… I still have a problem. When I try console.log(menu.getRandomDishFromCourse(menu._courses.appetizers)); I get this error

/home/ccuser/workspace/learn-javascript-objects-meal-maker/app.js:38
const randomIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * dishes.length)
^

TypeError: Cannot read property ‘length’ of undefined

My .length isn’t working and I can’t figure out why… (as the actor said to the bishop).

It’s probably something simple but I’m struggling see the problem

Here’s my full code:

https://gist.github.com/6d0946f2d3494b60659ab1479b6c76bc

#2

I noticed that in your getter methods there is not a return statement:

    get appetizers() {
      this._courses.appetizers;
  },

Add a return statement to the getters methods and see if that helps.

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#3

Here is your getRandomDishFromCourse method. What does it take as a parameter?

  getRandomDishFromCourse(courseName) { //courseName should be the name of a single course, no?
    const dishes = this._courses[courseName];
    const randomIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * dishes.length)
    return dishes[randomIndex];
  },

Here is your attempted test of the method:

console.log(menu.getRandomDishFromCourse(menu._courses.appetizers));

What are you passing as the argument? You could print it out to see:

console.log(menu._courses.appetizers);
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#4

I’ve just tried that and it seems to work fine

#5

Thanks, that’s a problem I didn’t know I had yet but so far it hasn’t fixed my .length problem

#6

Rather strange, it seems my test was in some way faulty because I discovered that my initial problem was that I hadn’t put a return statement into my generateRandomMeal method which was quite a substantial omission. But in my efforts to problem solve one method at a time I managed to confuse myself even more.

I would still like to find out why my .length wasn’t working when I tried to test the method but it must have worked when I generated my random meal

#7

When you tried to test your function, you didn’t pass a single course name as the argument. You passed the entire appetizers array, menu._courses.appetizers. When your function tried to access this._courses[courseName] it assigned dishes to undefined. Hence your error thrown in the next line when you attempted to get the length of dishes.

2 Likes
#8

If you are still having a problem with the length property returning undefined then it would be helpful if you could post the updated code after adding return statements and making adjustments to it.

#9

Solution code here:

https://gist.github.com/76685d2b6ae00fd8fc672412c320255d

#10

Ah yes, makes sense now. Thanks!

1 Like