Is there any benefit to using an object instead of several variables? - node.js

Question

I am writing an application in nodeJS - a Facebook messenger app.
My application contains a module called strings.js, which is basically used to store common strings. Any time I need to print a greeting or whatever I pull it from the strings.js file. Strings.js looks like this:
/*
* This module exports common strings.
* */
'use strict';
module.exports = {
// Quick replies for user to choose age range
ageReplies:[
{
//Option 1 CODE
},
{
//Option 2 CODE
},
{
//Option 3 CODE
}],
// Quick replies for user to choose gender
genderReplies:[
{
//Option 1 CODE
},
{
//Option 2 CODE
},
{
//Option 3 CODE
}],
// 'greetingButtons' is used to create the buttons sent to a registered
// user during the greeting
greetingButtons: [
{
//BUTTON 1 CODE
},
{
//BUTTON 2 CODE
},
{
//BUTTON 3 CODE
}],
userAgeString: "How old are you?",
userGenderString: "What's your gender?",
userInitialGreetingString: "Hello there! I don't believe we've spoken before. You'll need to create a user profile, so let's do that now.",
userNamePromptString: "What would you like me to call you?",
userPrefNamePromptString: "Ok, what would you like me to call you instead? Type it below:",
userWelcomeGreetingString: "Welcome back! I am ready and willing to serve, as always!",
};
The first two"objects" (if that's what we can call them), "ageReplies" and "GenderReplies" are used for generating quick replies in Facebook messenger when asking user for gender and age (during user profile creation).
The next is "greetingButtons", which is used for creating buttons, which are sent to a previously registered user with a "What would you like to do next?" message.
Finally I have a number of strings for greeting the user, prompting them to enter gender and age, and so on. There will be more of these as I add them.
I have been considering putting these individual strings in an object, for example as follows:
stringData: {
userAgeString: "How old are you?",
userGenderString: "What's your gender?",
userInitialGreetingString: "Hello there! I don't believe we've spoken before. You'll need to create a user profile, so let's do that now.",
userNamePromptString: "What would you like me to call you?",
userPrefNamePromptString: "Ok, what would you like me to call you instead? Type it below:",
userWelcomeGreetingString: "Welcome back! I am ready and willing to serve, as always!",
},
Is there any benefit to doing this? Is there any point?
Another question is, if I DID use an object like this, is it possible to put my buttons and quick replies into the same object, for example as below:
stringData: {
ageReplies:[ /* Age reply code */ ],
genderReplies: [ /* Gender reply code */ ],
greetingButtons: [ /* Button code */ ],
userAgeString: "How old are you?",
userGenderString: "What's your gender?",
userInitialGreetingString: "Hello there! I don't believe we've spoken before. You'll need to create a user profile, so let's do that now.",
userNamePromptString: "What would you like me to call you?",
userPrefNamePromptString: "Ok, what would you like me to call you instead? Type it below:",
userWelcomeGreetingString: "Welcome back! I am ready and willing to serve, as always!",
},
Would this work?
EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm not talking about having an object within my main code. The object I'm talking about would be within strings.js

Answer 1

Generally when writing a program that involves displaying text of some sort, I store all of my copy (text eventually sent to a user) in it's own file. These blocks of text have a variable name like you've made, and that allows me to refer to them around the system.
Why do I do this? Internationalisation (commonly shortened to i18n).
It's quite common practice to pull apart text displayed to uses from the rest of your application so that you can easily create multiple files for text and load from the correct one depending on the users language settings (or locale).
In that instance, you'd have a strings file per spoken language, where variable names are all the same. You then select from the specific file depending on settings / locale.
For this reason alone, I keep all my text separate from the rest of the application. This doesn't quite work when it's HTML based projects and such, but with things like nodejs server side error messages, it works perfectly.
Personally when I've built bots, the number of options (buttons) does not relate to the text I use in anyway. So my code to create varying options happens elsewhere, but will use the strings provided by my i18n module. This way text and buttons are decoupled nicely. Often button creation happens in a function that takes some sort of array of objects which represents the options for each button, I'll then pull in the text, when creating the final button markup, from my i18n files.
On a side note: I also don't label things like a "string" prefix or suffix, referring to something as i18n.welcomeGreeting or just welcomeGreeting and I find that's more than explicit enough for this stuff.
Tl;dr
It won't make a huge difference either way right now, but decoupling your text from your button creation can render useful benefits if your application is likely to grow in the future. It can also often make it easier to work with, and separates buttons from text. After all, you don't always use the two together in chat bots, so they should probably be separate concerns.