More efficient method of checking for properties

[gwenniekins]

recently have been going through some of the older code in my current project, and I’ve been improving things, such as the way I’m making sure an Instance has a specific property

I originally was using a very inefficient method

local function HasProperty(Obj : Instance, Prop : string) : boolean?
    local Clone = Obj:Clone()
    Clone:ClearAllChildren()

    return (pcall(function()
        local Property = Clone[Prop]
        
        Clone:Destroy()
        
        return Property
    end))
end

however, cloning clearly wasn’t going to be good in the long run, so I swapped over to my current solution, which checks for an object with the class as a child, if it finds one it checks if it has a property, and if not, it creates a new one using Obj.ClassName and checks it, parenting it to where I check for the objects originally(caching it so it doesn’t need to create and destroy it endlessly)

local function hasProperty(Obj: Instance, Prop: string): boolean
    return pcall(function()
        local Class = script:FindFirstChildWhichIsA(Obj.ClassName) or Instance.new(Obj.ClassName, script)

        return Class[Prop]
    end)
end

would it be better for me to not cache an object for each ClassName when it gets called(meaning calling :Destroy() before returning the result), or is there a method that would work without needlessly adding new instances?

(no I can’t just use Obj[Prop] since it could return children, hence why the first solution I used had :ClearAllChildren(), and checking typeof(Obj[Prop]) ~= "instance" would falsify properties with a object value)

[gwenniekins]

A friend of mine has given me a much more elegant solution, that avoids using extra objects!
Figured I’d stick it here so if anyone else comes looking for a method they can get it

local function HasProperty(Obj: Instance, Prop: string): boolean
    return pcall(function()
        Obj:GetPropertyChangedSignal(Prop)
    end)
end

Thanks Tani!