Question

I have a listView in my app. I loop through the items to check which one is currently selected and then return a value. As all paths have to return a value I have to return a value outside the loop which overwrites the for loop return, how do I keep this without overwriting it after the loop?

public string GetItemValue()
{
    for (int i = 0; i < listView1.Items.Count; i++)
    {
        if (listView1.Items[i].Checked == true)
        {
            return listView1.Items[i].Text; // I want to keep this value
        }
     }
     // Without overwriting it with this but the compiler 
     // requires me to return a value here
     return "Error"; 
}

Any help is most appreciated. Thanks.

P.S I have tried using break after the if but no luck.

Answer 1

On edit: bringing down my comment from above.

You don’t need to worry about this. As soon as it hits the first return inside the loop, it will return immediately with that value. No code outside the loop is ever hit in that case.

Incidentally, this code would be cleaner:

public string GetItemValue()
{
    foreach (var item in listView1.Items)
    {
        if (item.Checked) return item.Text;
    }
    throw new InvalidOperationException("No checked items found");
}

Exceptions are a more idiomatic way of handling errors, and the foreach loop is preferred to a for loop when you’re just iterating over collections.

Also using LINQ, you can get even more concise:

public string GetItemValue()
{
    return listView1.Items.Cast<ListViewItem>().Single(i => i.Checked).Text;
}