javascript hasOwnProperty() not finding property

Question

Working with angularjs and firebase writing a function that's supposed to check whether the currentUser can be found in the database. Right now the property "attendings" only contains one user and that is "Peter Pan"

services/party.js

isAttending: function (party) {
      if (User.signedIn() && party.attendings) {
          console.log(User.getCurrent().username);   //Writes out: Peter Pan
          console.log(eve.attendings);               //Writes out: Peter Pan
          console.log(party.attendings.hasOwnProperty(
                 User.getCurrent().username);        //Writes out: false
      return party.attendings.hasOwnProperty(User.getCurrent().username);
    }
}

Peter Pan was stored when the party object was created:

var Party = {
  ..
  create: function (p) {
      ...
      party.attendings = user.username;
      ...
    }
}

The user is apperantly stored in 'attendings' but why won't hasOwnProperty() find it?

Answer 1

I think you are mistaken about how hasOwnProperty works.

hasOwnProperty will return if the object has a property, in your case, party has a property attendings for instance, but that is all it will check, it won't check what the value of this property is (in this case Peter Pan).

Now, I assume you'd like attendings to be a list, in that case you need to find a value in a list, there are several ways, if you can use jQuery you could do something like:

$.inArray( User.getCurrent().username, [ party.attendings ] );

If you don't then take a look at different alternatives just googling to find a value in an array in javascript.