Question

I am having this Linq To SQL query which is taking Customer Category from database.The CustCategory will be defined already.Here is the query.

public IList<string> GetAccountType()
        {
            using (var db = new DataClasses1DataContext())
            {
                var  acctype = db.mem_types.Select(account=>account.CustCategory).Distinct().ToList();
                if (acctype != null)
                {
                    return acctype;
                }
            }

        }

Currently I am getting an error that Not all code paths return a value.If I am always certain that the value is there in the database then do I need to check for null,If I need to check for null then how do I handle this.
Can anyone help me with this.
Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

Since Enumerable.ToList never returns null (see the Return Value section of the documentation), you can safely remove the if.

EDIT: Note that, no matter what your database contains, acctype will never be null:

• If no value is found in the database, the return value will be an empty list (which is different than null).
• If one record is found and its value is null, the return value will be a valid list with one entry, whose value is null. Still, the list itself is not null.