Disallow Assignment in return Statement (no-return-assign)

One of the interesting, and sometimes confusing, aspects of JavaScript is that assignment can happen at almost any point. Because of this, an errant equals sign can end up causing assignment when the true intent was to do a comparison. This is especially true when using a return statement. For example:

function doSomething() {
    return foo = bar + 2;
}

It is difficult to tell the intent of the return statement here. It's possible that the function is meant to return the result of bar + 2, but then why is it assigning to foo? It's also possible that the intent was to use a comparison operator such as == and that this code is an error.

Because of this ambiguity, it's considered a best practice to not use assignment in return statements.

Rule Details

This rule aims to eliminate assignments from return statements. As such, it will warn whenever an assignment is found as part of return.

Options

The rule takes one option, a string, which must contain one of the following values:

• except-parens (default): Disallow assignments unless they are enclosed in parentheses.
• always: Disallow all assignments.

except-parens

This is the default option. It disallows assignments unless they are enclosed in parentheses.

Examples of incorrect code for the default "except-parens" option:

/*eslint no-return-assign: "error"*/

function doSomething() {
    return foo = bar + 2;
}

function doSomething() {
    return foo += 2;
}

Examples of correct code for the default "except-parens" option:

/*eslint no-return-assign: "error"*/

function doSomething() {
    return foo == bar + 2;
}

function doSomething() {
    return foo === bar + 2;
}

function doSomething() {
    return (foo = bar + 2);
}

always

This option disallows all assignments in return statements. All assignments are treated as problems.

Examples of incorrect code for the "always" option:

/*eslint no-return-assign: ["error", "always"]*/

function doSomething() {
    return foo = bar + 2;
}

function doSomething() {
    return foo += 2;
}

function doSomething() {
    return (foo = bar + 2);
}

Examples of correct code for the "always" option:

/*eslint no-return-assign: ["error", "always"]*/

function doSomething() {
    return foo == bar + 2;
}

function doSomething() {
    return foo === bar + 2;
}

When Not To Use It

If you want to allow the use of assignment operators in a return statement, then you can safely disable this rule. Source: http://eslint.org/docs/rules/

Duplicated Code

Duplicated code can lead to software that is hard to understand and difficult to change. The Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle states:

Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.

When you violate DRY, bugs and maintenance problems are sure to follow. Duplicated code has a tendency to both continue to replicate and also to diverge (leaving bugs as two similar implementations differ in subtle ways).

Tuning

This issue has a mass of 257.

We set useful threshold defaults for the languages we support but you may want to adjust these settings based on your project guidelines.

The threshold configuration represents the minimum mass a code block must have to be analyzed for duplication. The lower the threshold, the more fine-grained the comparison.

If the engine is too easily reporting duplication, try raising the threshold. If you suspect that the engine isn't catching enough duplication, try lowering the threshold. The best setting tends to differ from language to language.

See codeclimate-duplication's documentation for more information about tuning the mass threshold in your .codeclimate.yml.

Refactorings

• Extract Method
• Extract Class
• Form Template Method
• Introduce Null Object
• Pull Up Method
• Pull Up Field
• Substitute Algorithm

Further Reading

• Don't Repeat Yourself on the C2 Wiki
• Duplicated Code on SourceMaking
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler. Duplicated Code, p76