Angular 2 templates methods vs getters

I looked deeper into this and played with typescript Playground. I declared two classes one with getter and the second with get method as described in your questions.

Lets see how it looks like:

In the first example we declared a method for getting the property value in the following way:

class Greeter {
  greeting: string;
  constructor(message: string) {
      this.greeting = message;
  }
   getGreeting() {
      return this.greeting;
  }
}

Which after translation to javascript it looks like:

var Greeter = (function () {
   function Greeter(message) {
       this.greeting = message;
   }
   Greeter.prototype.getGreeting = function () {
       return this.greeting;
   };
   return Greeter;
}());

And regarding the second example where we declared a getter in the following way:

class GetterGreeter {
   _greeting: string;
   constructor(message: string) {
       this._greeting = message;
   }
    get greeting() {
       return this._greeting;
   }
}

Which after translation looks like:

var GetterGreeter = (function () {
   function GetterGreeter(message) {
       this._greeting = message;
   }
   Object.defineProperty(GetterGreeter.prototype, "greeting", {
       get: function () {
           return this._greeting;
       },
       enumerable: true,
       configurable: true
   });
   return GetterGreeter;
}());

(You can play with the declaration and the translation to javascript here)

As you can see with get method (as in your first example) the method is declared on the prototype and in your second example using the getter pattern typescript uses the defineProperty api.

In both cases we are invoking a method and angular will also call a method during its change detection to identify changes and re-render.

As I see it this is only a syntactic sugar for the same approach and I don't see any performance benefit for one of the methods.


by get / set syntax the method behaves like a field, see below examples:

Using by regular getter method

usingGetterMethod()
{
  let id = this.getId();
}

getId()
{
  return this.reactiveForm.get('id');
}

Using by get method

usingGetMethod()
{
  let id = this.id;
}

get id()
{
  return this.reactiveForm.get('id');
}

If you are a getter or a method doesn't matter from a technical point of view.

Some use the convention that a getter should behave similar to a field, and not do expensive computation, while a method should be used if the computation is more than some very basic things like for example building a full name from first- middle- and last name.

I think this is good practice to follow that distinction for Angular, because for view binding expensive calculation should be avoided because the method or getter can be called very often. In such a case it's better to store the result in a field and bind to the field instead.

Very important in view binding is, that the method or getter doesn't return different values on subsequent calls when no dependencies were modified (like return {};, which would be treated as new object instance and cause an error like ExpressionChangedAfterItHasBeenCheckedError).