Question

I am using MVC with LINQ-to-SQL class.

as foreign key can be null, i have one record having f.k. null and others are having values.

now i am displaying it in view by Index view.

In index view i am resolving f.k. by writing code like

<%= Html.Encode(item.UserModified.UserName) %> 

Now i have a problem in view that ‘object reference is not set’.

And this is because of we are having null value in one of the f.k. field!

so can i write code in view to check whether Associated object pointing to null or nothing?

Answer 1

You can write any code you want in the view if necessary, so you could do:

<%= Html.Encode(item.UserModified.UserName ?? string.Empty) %> 

You could also make a HtmlHelper extension to do this:

public string SafeEncode(this HtmlHelper helper, string valueToEncode) {     return helper.Encode(valueToEncode ?? string.Empty); } 

You could then simply do:

<%= Html.SafeEncode(item.UserModified.UserName) %> 

Of course if it’s UserModified that’s null and not UserName then you’ll need some different logic.