Retrieving a message from a cryptocurrency daemon

Question

The objective of this piece of code is to get a message from a cryptocurrency daemon through RPC and extract the transactions object to pass it to the view. Is there a simpler / less ugly way of doing this?

$transaction_pool = json_decode($rpc->getTransactionPool(), false);
if(isset($transaction_pool->transactions)){
 $transaction_pool = $transaction_pool->transactions;
}else{
 $transaction_pool = (object)NULL;
}

View partial:

@forelse ($transaction_pool as $transaction)
<?php $transaction_json = json_decode($transaction->tx_json); ?>
 <div class="row show-grid top-row">
 <div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-12 col-md-7">{{ $transaction->id_hash }}</div>
 <div class="col-xs-12 col-sm-7 col-md-5 pull-right">
 @if ($transaction_json->version == 2)
 <div class="col-xs-7 col-md-6"><i class="fa fa-envelope-o"></i>&nbsp;confidential</div>
 @else
 <div class="col-xs-7 col-md-6">@coin($transaction_json->amount)</div>
 @endif
 <div class="col-xs-5 col-md-6">@coin($transaction->fee)</div>
 </div>
 </div>
 @empty
 <div class="row show-grid top-row">
 <div class="col-xs-12">No transactions</div>
 </div>
@endforelse

<div class="panel-heading large">
 Transactions ({{ count($transaction_pool) }})
</div>

• Phrancis: Welcome to Code Review! Please try to write a title that summarizes what your code does; as it is the title is quite generic and could apply to many other questions.
• Phrancis: Yes much better!
• Mike Brant: Can you give examples of JSON returned from rpc for empty and not empty cases?

Answer 1

I don't get the point where you cast null to object.

I'm not sure what are you trying to achive, but you can always make if 'less ugly'.

$transcations_pool = json_decode($rpc->getTransactionPool(), false); 
$transactions_pool = isset($transactions_pool->transactions) ? 
 $transaction_pool->transactions : 
 (object) null;

Also i would move div .show-grid to separate file and load it like this:

@include('path/to/file', [ 'transaction_json' => json_decode($transaction->tx_json) ])

Or you can implement special method like $transaction->decodeTxJson() to handle this decoding in $transaction class.

• codez: Ternary operators is a big NO here.
• rkd.me: To be honest this is way more readable to me. Three lines to show condition, true section and false section. But i understand some people find these as you called "big NO".
• codez: The object casting needs to be entirely removed. There are many clean approaches to do that.
• Papa Lazzarou: @rk-dev.net Righto. I kinda forgot to add the crucial part of the code. I need to count() the result of the json_decode. Since it is not Countable it returns 1 even if it is empty. Edited the question. Thanks!