Geekality » Best practices http://www.geekality.net With a hint of Social Ineptitude Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:15:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 When to check for null http://www.geekality.net/2009/01/15/when-to-check-for-null/ http://www.geekality.net/2009/01/15/when-to-check-for-null/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:13:11 +0000 Torleif http://www.geekality.net/?p=48 Continue reading →]]> I often get truly tired of all the null checking when programming. I keep asking myself, is this really necessary? For example, I am the one coding it, and I am the only one who will be sending stuff into those methods. This is of course not always the case, but very often it is.

Anyways, I found some good advice on when we should check for null values and thought I could note it down here and share it.

One thing to remember is that the code you write today, while it may be a small team and you can have good documentation, will turn into legacy code that someone else will have to maintain. I use the following rules:

  • If I’m writing a public API that will be exposed to others, then I will do null checks on all reference parameters.
  • If I’m writing an internal component to my application, I write null checks when I need to do something special when a null exists, or when I want to make it very clear. Otherwise I don’t mind getting the null reference exception since that is also fairly clear what is going on.
  • When working with return data from other peoples frameworks, I only check for null when it is possible and valid to have a null returned. If their contract says it doesn’t return nulls, I won’t do the check.

Very good advice :)

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