I just coded a little application and very often I was having to check to see if the object was null before attempting to access one of its properties. If it was null, I would use an arbitrary default value. This ultimately was to prevent the dreaded NullReferenceException.
string output;
if (myObj == null) {
output = "Unknown";
}
else {
output = myObj.Name;
}
This bit of code was repeated over and over again making my method very long. Bad. And it looked very messy so I made a little helper method:
public static TReturn GetValueOrDefault<TReturn>(object obj, TReturn defaultValue, Func<TReturn> expression) {
return obj == null ? defaultValue : expression();
}
This also uses the lovely TReturn so you it can handle any type.
Using this helper method is very simple:
return GetValueOrDefault(myObj, "Unknown", () => myObj.Name);
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