Finding director in management hierarchy

[shill]

I am attempting to setup a script to navigate "up" the manager hierarchy to find the users Director.
We pass the users direct manager from an import and pass a "manager level" field that cooresponds to where you are in the org.
In this case, a Director has a manager level of 1.

Officially, there are only 3 levels below a Director, but, some levels manage others of the same level, so instead of just dot walking 3 levels to reach the Director record, it could be any number of levels.

I originally had three if statements to check three levels deep until I found a level 1.

function getDirector(user){
   
// get user's level and return nothing if Director or above   
var mgrl = user.u_manager_level;
   
     if (mgrl == '1' || mgrl == '3' || mgrl == '11' || mgrl == '0'){
           return "";
     }
   
     else if (user.manager.u_manager_level == '1'){
           return user.manager;
     }
     else if (user.manager.manager.u_manager_level == '1'){
           return user.manager.manager;
     }
     else if (user.manager.manager.manager.u_manager_level == '1'){
           return user.manager.manager.manager;
     }
}

This works fine except for those beyond 3 levels.
Besides just adding 2-3 more if statements and digging deeper, is there a way I can simplify this code to dot walk until I reach a level 1 manager regardless of how far I have to dig?

[michael_baker]

The below function should do the trick. It uses a while loop to walk up to the manager record.

function getDirector(user){

  // If user's manager level is a Director or above, return nothing
  if (user.u_manager_level == '1' || user.u_manager_level == '3' || user.u_manager_level == '11' || user.u_manager_level == '0') {
    return "";
  }

  // While user's manager level is not a Director, set user to manager and perform check
  while (user.u_manager_level != '1') {
    user = user.manager.getRefRecord();
  }

  return user;
}

Hope this helps!

[shill]

I new there had to be a simple way to do this...
You solution never crossed my mind.