Refactoring Hexagon State into a Unified Model

TLDR

Quick Saturday morning session where I refactored hexagon colors and roll values under a single Hexagon object. Had some trouble with Angular / TypeScript typing of the dictionary for some reason.

Main work

• Updating server-side models to use HashMap<Integer, Hexagon> within GameState.
• Updating client-side Angular code to expect this HashMap.

Challenges

• For some reason, Angular was having trouble dealing with the IDictionary<Hexagon> type I defined for accepting the HashMap<Integer, Hexagon>.
  • For now, I hacked around a null reference error by using Object.values(). This will have to be fixed in the future, since it assumes the IDictionary<T> / HashMap<Integer, T> have ordered keys.

Learnings

• Changes to model are relatively easy and not mentally taxing, but eat up time. If I had just done the work originally to make the Hexagon dictionary, I wouldn’t have spend an hour refactoring things and actually pushed the app’s functionality forward.