Question

I have a View which can be accessed when the Model is populated with data and when the Model is completely empty.

When the Model is empty, it means that the user clicked on “Create New”.

At the moment, I am getting a NullReferenceException because there obviously isn’t anything inside Model. If I pass an object over to the view then the browser just freezes because the object contains null items inside it.

Is there a quicker/better way of doing this instead of doing:
MyObject myObj = new MyObj();
myObj.InnerObj = new Object(){data = ....};
...

I hope that makes sense 🙂

Answer 1

You can use the NullObject pattern:

Create a subclass of MyObject that has all properties prepopulated and methods that purposefully implement no behavior. For instance:

public sealed class NullObject : MyObject
{
    public object InnerObj { get; private set; }
    public NullObject()
    {
        InnerObj = new Object { ... };
    }
}