Object Hierarchy and Inheritance in JavaScript
- The Employee Example
- Creating the Hierarchy
- Object Properties
- More Flexible Constructors
- Property Inheritance Revisited
Employee
class could represent the set of all employees. An instance, on the other hand, is the instantiation of a class; that is, one of its members. For example, Victoria
could be an instance of the Employee
class, representing a particular individual as an employee. An instance has exactly the properties of its parent class (no more, no less).
A prototype-based language, such as JavaScript, does not make this distinction: it simply has objects. A prototype-based language has the notion of a prototypical object, an object used as a template from which to get the initial properties for a new object. Any object can specify its own properties, either when you create it or even at runtime. In addition, any object can be associated as the prototype for another object, allowing the second object to share the first object's properties.
In class-based languages, you define a class in a separate class definition. In that definition you can specify special methods, called constructors, to use to create instances of the class. A constructor method can specify initial values for the instance's properties and perform other processing appropriate at creation time. You use the new operator in association with the constructor method to create class instances.
JavaScript follows a similar model, but does not have a class definition separate from the constructor. Instead, you define a constructor function to create objects with a particular initial set of properties and values. Any JavaScript function can be used as a constructor. You use the new operator with a constructor function to create a new object.
In a class-based language, you create a hierarchy of classes through the class definitions. In a class definition, you can specify that the new class is a subclass of an already existing class. The subclass inherits all the properties of the superclass and additionally can add new properties or modify the inherited ones. For example, assume the Employee
class includes only name
and dept
properties and Manager
is a subclass of Employee
that adds the reports
property. In this case, an instance of the Manager
class would have all three properties: name
, dept
, and reports
.
JavaScript implements inheritance by allowing you to associate a prototypical object with any constructor function. So, you can create exactly the Employee
-Manager
example, but you use slightly different terminology. First you define the Employee
constructor function, specifying the name
and dept
properties. Next, you define the Manager
constructor function, specifying the reports
property. Finally, you assign a new Employee
object as the prototype
for the Manager
constructor function. Then, when you create a new Manager
, it inherits the name
and dept
properties from the Employee
object.
In class-based languages, you typically create a class at compile time and then you instantiate instances of the class either at compile time or at runtime. You cannot change the number or the type of properties of a class after you define the class. In JavaScript, however, at runtime you can add or remove properties from any object. If you add a property to an object that is used as the prototype for a set of objects, the objects for which it is the prototype also get the new property.
Table?1 gives a short summary of some of these differences. The rest of this paper describes the details of using JavaScript constructors and prototypes to create an object hierarchy and compares this to how you would do it in Java.
Table 1?Comparison of class-based (Java) and prototype-based (JavaScript) object systems
The Employee Example
The rest of this paper works with the simple employee hierarchy shown in Figure 1. Figure 1??? A simple object hierarchy
Manager
is based on Employee
. It adds the reports
property (whose value defaults to an empty array, intended to have an array of Employee
objects as its value). WorkerBee
is also based on Employee
. It adds the projects
property (whose value defaults to an empty array, intended to have an array of strings as its value). SalesPerson
is based on WorkerBee
. It adds the quota
property (whose value defaults to 100). It also overrides the dept
property with the value "sales"
, indicating that all salespersons are in the same department. Engineer
is based on WorkerBee
. It adds the machine
property (whose value defaults to the empty string) and also overrides the dept
property with the value "engineering"
. Creating the Hierarchy
There are several ways you can define appropriate constructor functions to implement the Employee hierarchy. How you choose to define them depends largely on what you want to be able to do in your application. We'll get into all that later. For now, let's use very simple (and comparatively inflexible) definitions just to see how we get the inheritance to work. In these definitions, you can't specify any property values when you create an object. The newly-created object simply gets the default values, which you can change at a later time. Figure 2 illustrates the hierarchy with these simple definitions. In a real application, you would probably define constructors that allow you to provide property values at object creation time. Options for doing so are described later in . For now, these simple definitions let us look at how the inheritance occurs. Figure 2??? What the definitions look likeEmployee
definitions below are similar. The only difference is that you need to specify the type for each property in Java but not in JavaScript and you need to create an explicit constructor method for the Java class.
Manager
and WorkerBee definitions show the difference in how you specify the next object higher in the inheritance chain. In JavaScript, you add a prototypical instance as the value of the prototype
property of the constructor function. You can do so at any time after you define the constructor. In Java, you specify the superclass within the class definition. You cannot change the superclass outside the class definition.
Engineer
and SalesPerson
definitions create objects that descend from WorkerBee
and hence from Employee
. An object of these types has properties of all the objects above it in the chain. In addition, these definitions override the inherited value of the dept
property with new values specific to these objects.
NOTE: As described earlier, the term instance has a specific technical meaning in class-based languages. In these languages, an instance is an individual member of a class and is fundamentally different from a class. In JavaScript, "instance" does not have this technical meaning because JavaScript does not have this difference between classes and instances. However, in talking about JavaScript, "instance" can be used informally to mean an object created using a particular constructor function. So, in this example, you could informally say thatFigure 3??? Creating objects with the simple definitionsjane
is an instance ofEngineer
. Similarly, although the terms parent, child, ancestor, and descendant do not have formal meanings in JavaScript, we can use them informally to refer to objects higher or lower in the prototype chain.
Object Properties
This section discusses how objects inherit properties from other objects in the prototype chain and what happens when you add a property at runtime.Inheriting Properties
Assume you create themark
object as a WorkerBee
as shown in Figure 3 with this statement:
mark = new WorkerBee;When JavaScript sees the
new
operator, it creates a new generic object and passes this new object as the value of the this
keyword to the WorkerBee
constructor function. The constructor function explicitly sets the value of the projects
property. It also sets the value of the internal __proto__
property to the value of WorkerBee.prototype
. (That property name has 2 underscore characters at the front and 2 at the end.) The __proto__
property determines the prototype chain used to return property values. Once these properties are set, JavaScript returns the new object and the assignment statement sets the variable mark
to that object.
This process doesn't explicitly put values in the mark
object (local values) for the properties mark
inherits from the prototype chain. When you ask for the value of a property, JavaScript first checks to see if the value exists in that object. If it does, that value is returned. If the value isn't there locally, JavaScript checks the prototype chain (using the __proto__
property). If an object in the prototype chain has a value for the property, that value is returned. If no such property is found, JavaScript says the object doesn't have the property. In this way, the mark
object has the following properties and values:
mark.name = "";The
mark.dept = "general";
mark.projects = [];
mark
object inherits values for the name
and dept
properties from the prototypical object in mark.__proto__
. It is assigned a local value for the projects
property by the WorkerBee
constructor. Simply put, this gives you inheritance of properties and their values in JavaScript. Some subtleties of this process are discussed in .
Because these constructors don't let you supply instance-specific values, this information is generic. The property values are the default ones shared by all new objects created from WorkerBee
. You can, of course, change the values of any of these properties. So, you could give specific information for mark
as shown here:
mark.name = "Doe, Mark";
mark.dept = "admin";
mark.projects = ["navigator"];
Adding Properties
In JavaScript at runtime you can add properties to any object. You are not constrained to use only the properties provided by the constructor function. To add a property that is specific to a single object, you simply assign a value to the object, as in:mark.bonus = 3000;Now, the
mark
object has a bonus
property, but no other WorkerBee
has this property.
If you add a new property to an object that is being used as the prototype for a constructor function, you add that property to all objects that inherit properties from the prototype. For example, you can add a specialty
property to all employees with the following statement:
Employee.prototype.specialty = "none";As soon as JavaScript executes this statement, the
mark
object also has the specialty
property with the value of "none"
. Figure 4 shows the effect of adding this property to the Employee
prototype and then overriding it for the Engineer
prototype.
Figure 4??? Adding properties
More Flexible Constructors
The constructor functions used so far do not let you specify property values when you create an instance. As with Java, you can provide arguments to constructors to initialize property values for instances. Figure 5 shows one way to do this. Figure 5??? Specifying properties in a constructor, take 1this.name = name || "";The JavaScript logical OR operator (
||
) evaluates its first argument. If that argument is converts to true, the operator returns it. Otherwise, the operator returns the value of the second argument. Therefore, this line of code tests to see if name
has a useful value for the name
property. If it does, it sets this.name
to that value. Otherwise, it sets this.name
to the empty string. This paper uses this idiom for brevity; however, it can be puzzling at first glance.
With these definitions, when you create an instance of an object, you can specify values for the locally defined properties. As shown in Figure 5, you can use this statement to create a new Engineer
:
jane = new Engineer("belau");Jane's properties are now:
jane.name == "";Notice that with these definitions, you cannot specify an initial value for an inherited property such as
jane.dept == "general";
jane.projects == [];
jane.machine == "belau"
name
. If you want to specify an initial value for inherited properties in JavaScript, you need to add more code to the constructor function.
So far, the constructor function has created a generic object and then specified local properties and values for the new object. You can have the constructor add more properties by directly calling the constructor function for an object higher in the prototype chain. Figure 6 shows these new definitions.
Figure 6??? Specifying properties in a constructor, take 2
Engineer
constructor:
function Engineer (name, projs, mach) {Assume we create a new
this.base = WorkerBee;
this.base(name, "engineering", projs);
this.projects = mach || "";
}
Engineer
object as follows:
jane = new Engineer("Doe, Jane", ["navigator", "javascript"], "belau");JavaScript follows these steps:
1.???First, thenew
operator creates a generic object and sets its__proto__
property toEngineer.prototype
.
2.???Thenew
operator then passes the new object to theEngineer
constructor as the value of thethis
keyword.
3.???Next, the constructor creates a new property calledbase
for that object and assigns the value of theWorkerBee
constructor to thebase
property. This makes theWorkerBee
constructor a method of theEngineer
object.
NOTE: The name of thebase
property is not special. You can use any legal property name;base
is simply evocative of its purpose.
4.???Next, the constructor calls thebase
method, passing as its arguments two of the arguments passed to the constructor ("Doe, Jane"
and["navigator", "javascript"]
) and also the string"engineering"
. Explicitly using"engineering"
in the constructor indicates that allEngineer
objects have the same value for the inheriteddept
property and this value overrides the value inherited fromEmployee
.
5.???Becausebase
is a method ofEngineer
, within the call tobase
, JavaScript binds thethis
keyword to the object created in step?1. Thus, theWorkerBee
function in turn passes the"Doe, Jane"
and["navigator", "javascript"]
arguments to theEmployee
constructor function. Upon return from theEmployee
constructor function, theWorkerBee
function uses the remaining argument to set theprojects
property.
6.???Upon return from thebase
method, theEngineer
constructor initializes the object'smachine
property to"belau"
.
7.???Upon return from the constructor, JavaScript assigns the new object to the jane
variable.
You might think that, having called the WorkerBee
constructor from inside the Engineer
constructor, you've set up inheritance appropriately for Engineer
objects. This is not the case. Calling the WorkerBee
constructor ensures that an Engineer
object starts out with the properties specified in all constructor functions that are called. However, if you later add properties to the Employee
or WorkerBee
prototypes, those properties are not inherited by the Engineer
object. For example, assume you have these statements:
function Engineer (name, projs, mach) {The
this.base = WorkerBee;
this.base(name, "engineering", projs);
this.projects = mach || "";
}
jane = new Engineer("Doe, Jane", ["navigator", "javascript"], "belau");
Employee.prototype.specialty = "none";
jane
object does not inherit the specialty
property. You still need to explicitly set up the prototype to ensure dynamic inheritance. Assume instead you have these statements:
function Engineer (name, projs, mach) {Now the value of the
this.base = WorkerBee;
this.base(name, "engineering", projs);
this.projects = mach || "";
}
Engineer.prototype = new WorkerBee;
jane = new Engineer("Doe, Jane", ["navigator", "javascript"], "belau");
Employee.prototype.specialty = "none";
jane
object's specialty
property is "none"
.
Property Inheritance Revisited
The preceding sections have described how constructors and prototypes provide hierarchies and inheritance in JavaScript. As with all languages, there are some subtleties that were not necessarily apparent in these earlier discussions. This section discusses some of those subtleties.Local versus Inherited Values
Let's revisit property inheritance briefly. As discussed earlier, when you access an object property, JavaScript performs these steps:- Check to see if the value exists locally. If it does, return that value.
- If there isn't a local value, check the prototype chain (using the
__proto__
property). - If an object in the prototype chain has a value for the specified property, return that value.
- If no such property is found, the object does not have the property.
function Employee () {
this.name = "";
this.dept = "general";
}
function WorkerBee () {With these definitions, assume you create
this.projects = [];
}
WorkerBee.prototype = new Employee;
amy
as an instance of WorkerBee
with this statement:
amy = new WorkerBee;The
amy
object has one local property, projects
. The values for the name
and dept
properties are not local to amy
and so are gotten from the amy
object's __proto__
property. Thus, amy
has these property values:
amy.name == "";Now assume you change the value of the
amy.dept = "general";
amy.projects == [];
name
property in the prototype associated with Employee
:
Employee.prototype.name = "Unknown"At first glance, you might expect that new value to propagate down to all the instances of
Employee
. However, it does not.
When you create any instance of the Employee
object, that instance gets a local value for the name
property (the empty string). This means that when you set the WorkerBee
prototype by creating a new Employee
object, WorkerBee.prototype
has a local value for the name
property. Therefore, when JavaScript looks up the name
property of the amy
object (an instance of WorkerBee
), JavaScript finds the local value for that property in WorkerBee.prototype
. It therefore does not look farther up the chain to Employee.prototype
.
If you want to change the value of an object property at runtime and have the new value be inherited by all descendants of the object, you cannot define the property in the object's constructor function. Instead, you add it to the constructor's associated prototype. For example, assume you change the code above to the following:
function Employee () {
???this.dept = "general";
}
Employee.prototype.name = "";
function WorkerBee () {
this.projects = [];
}
WorkerBee.prototype = new Employee;
amy = new WorkerBee;
Employee.prototype.name = "Unknown";In this case, the
name
property of amy
becomes "
Unknown"
.
As these examples show, if you want to have default values for object properties and you want to be able to change the default values at runtime, you should set the properties in the constructor's prototype, not in the constructor function itself.
Determining Instance Relationships
You may want to know what objects are in the prototype chain for an object, so that you can tell from what objects this object inherits properties. In a class-based language, you might have aninstanceof
operator for this purpose. JavaScript does not provide instanceof
, but you can write such a function yourself.
As discussed in , when you use the new
operator with a constructor function to create a new object, JavaScript sets the __proto__
property of the new object to the value of the prototype
property of the constructor function. You can use this to test the prototype chain.
For example, assume you have the same set of definitions we've been using, with the prototypes set appropriately. Create an __proto__
object as follows:
chris = new Engineer("Pigman, Chris", ["jsd"], "fiji");With this object, the following statements are all true:
chris.__proto__ == Engineer.prototype;Given this, you could write an
chris.__proto__.__proto__ == WorkerBee.prototype;
chris.__proto__.__proto__.__proto__ == Employee.prototype;
chris.__proto__.__proto__.__proto__.__proto__ == Object.prototype;
chris.__proto__.__proto__.__proto__.__proto__.__proto__ == null;
instanceOf
function as follows:
function instanceOf(object, constructor) {With this definition, the following expressions are all true:
???while (object != null) {
??????if (object == constructor.prototype)
?????????return true;
??????object = object.__proto__;
???}
???return false;
}
instanceOf (chris, Engineer)But this expression is false:
instanceOf (chris, WorkerBee)
instanceOf (chris, Employee)
instanceOf (chris, Object)
instanceOf (chris, SalesPerson)
Global Information in Constructors
When you create constructors, you need to be careful if you set global information in the constructor. For example, assume that you want a unique ID to be automatically assigned to each new employee. You could use this definition forEmployee
:
var idCounter = 1;
function Employee (name, dept) {With this definition, when you create a new
???this.name = name || "";
???this.dept = dept || "general";
???this.id = idCounter++;
}
Employee
, the constructor assigns it the next ID in sequence and then increments the global ID counter. So, if your next statement were:
victoria = new Employee("Pigbert, Victoria", "pubs")
harry = new Employee("Tschopik, Harry", "sales")
victoria.id
is 1 and harry.id
is 2. At first glance that seems fine. However, idCounter
gets incremented every time an Employee
object is created, for whatever purpose. If you create the entire Employee
hierarchy we've been working with, the Employee
constructor is called every time we set up a prototype. That is, assume you have this code:
var idCounter = 1;
function Employee (name, dept) {
???this.name = name || "";
???this.dept = dept || "general";
???this.id = idCounter++;
}
function Manager (name, dept, reports) {...}
Manager.prototype = new Employee;
function WorkerBee (name, dept, projs) {...}
WorkerBee.prototype = new Employee;
function Engineer (name, projs, mach) {...}
Engineer.prototype = new WorkerBee;
function SalesPerson (name, projs, quota) {...}
SalesPerson.prototype = new WorkerBee;
mac = new Engineer("Wood, Mac");Further assume that the definitions we've omitted here have the
base
property and call the constructor above them in the prototype chain. In this case, by the time the mac
object is created, mac.id
is 5.
Depending on the application, it may or may not matter that the counter has been incremented these extra times. If you care about the exact value of this counter, one possible solution involves instead using this constructor:
function Employee (name, dept) {When you create an instance of
???this.name = name || "";
???this.dept = dept || "general";
???if (name)
??????this.id = idCounter++;
}
Employee
to use as a prototype, you do not supply arguments to the constructor. Using this definition of the constructor, when you do not supply arguments, the constructor does not assign a value to the id and does not update the counter. Therefore, for an Employee
to get an assigned id, you must specify a name for the employee. In our example, mac.id
would be 1.
No Multiple Inheritance
Some object-oriented languages allow multiple inheritance. That is, an object can inherit the properties and values from unrelated parent objects. JavaScript does not support multiple inheritance. As we've already said, inheritance of property values occurs at runtime by JavaScript searching the prototype chain of an object to find a value. Because an object has a single associated prototype, JavaScript cannot dynamically inherit from more than one prototype chain. In JavaScript you can have a constructor function call more than one other constructor function within it. This gives the illusion of multiple inheritance. For example, consider the following statements:function Hobbyist (hobby) {
???this.hobby = hobby || "scuba";
}
function Engineer (name, projs, mach, hobby) {
???this.base1 = WorkerBee;
???this.base1(name, "engineering", projs);
???this.base2 = Hobbyist;
???this.base2(hobby);
???this.projects = mach || "";
}
Engineer.prototype = new WorkerBee;
dennis = new Engineer("Doe, Dennis", ["collabra"], "hugo")Further assume that the definition of
WorkerBee
is as we've previously seen it. In this case, the dennis object has these properties:
dennis.name == "Doe, Dennis"So
dennis.dept == "engineering"
dennis.projects == ["collabra"]
dennis.machine == "hugo"
dennis.hobby == "scuba"
dennis
does get the hobby
property from the Hobbyist
constructor. However, assume you then add a property to the Hobbyist
constructor's prototype:
Hobbyist.prototype.equipment = ["mask", "fins", "regulator", "bcd"]The
dennis
object does not inherit this new property.
Last Updated: 12/18/97 15:19:54