How do I reduce the "Cyclomatic Complexity" of the following code

Corey Scott picture Corey Scott · Oct 9, 2012 · Viewed 22.1k times · Source

I am wondering how to reduce the Cyclomatic Complexity of the following code and if this is even something that I should be worried about.

Please refer to the method ValuePojo.getSomething() (Please don't worry about the variable naming, this has been re-written for clarity in this question)

public class ValuePojo
{
    private ValueTypeEnum type;

    private BigDecimal    value1;

    private BigDecimal    value2;

    private BigDecimal    value3;

    public ValuePojo()
    {
        super();
    }

    /**
     * This method reports as "HIGH Cyclomatic Complexity"
     * 
     * @return
     */
    public BigDecimal getSomething()
    {
        if (this.type == null)
        {
            return null;
        }

        switch (this.type)
        {
            case TYPE_A:
            case TYPE_B:
            case TYPE_C:
            case TYPE_D:
                return this.value1;

            case TYPE_E:
            case TYPE_F:
            case TYPE_G:
            case TYPE_H:
                return this.value2;

            case TYPE_I:
            case TYPE_J:
                return this.value3;
        }

        return null;
    }
}

Answer

Kim Stebel picture Kim Stebel · Oct 9, 2012

If you really need to get the cyclomatic complexity down, you can consider using a Map. Obviously, in your implementation, it should only be created and initialized once.

  public BigDecimal getSomething() {
      if (this.type == null) {
          return null;
      }
      Map<Type,BigDecimal> map = new HashMap<Type,BigDecimal>();
      map.put(TYPE_A, value1);
      map.put(TYPE_B, value1);
      map.put(TYPE_C, value1);
      map.put(TYPE_D, value1);
      map.put(TYPE_E, value2);
      map.put(TYPE_F, value2);
      map.put(TYPE_G, value2);
      map.put(TYPE_H, value2);
      map.put(TYPE_I, value3);
      map.put(TYPE_J, value3);

      return map.get(type);
  }