Question

I have a very large object with many nullable-type variables. I also have a dictionary which I want to fill up with this object’s non-null variables.

The code will look something like this

if (myObject.whatever != null)
{
myDictionary.Add("...",myObject.whatever);
}
if (myObject.somethingElse != null)
{
myDictionary.Add("...",myObject.somethingElse);

...

EDIT (Sorry messed up the code)

When we repeat this for the umpteenth time we get a mess of very long code. Is there some shorter way I could write this mess? I know about the Conditional Operator (aka ?) but that’s just for assignments. Is there something like that for adding to a collection?

Answer 1

How about an extension method for your dictionary?

public static void AddIfNotNull<T,U>(this Dictionary<T,U> dic, T key, U value) 
where U : class {
    if (value != null) { dic.Add(key, value); }
}

You could then do this:

myDictionary.AddIfNotNull("...",myObject.whatever);