Question

So I have a Retrieve() function, which either gets me an object or a null (if that object is not found). I’m using an if statement with a boolean attribute of that object. It’s set up like this.

if(Retrieve(index).IsForm == true) {}

The issue with this is that if it doesn’t find an object, it’ll throw a null reference exception. There are some ways around this, of course, but none that I find concise. There’s a try…catch, but that seems pointless when I expect the error. I can check if the object is null first, if(Retrieve(index) != null), but that seems like adding needless nesting. Is there a clever way to handle this? I thought of using the null coalescing operator but it doesn’t work in this situation.

Answer 1

You can either call the method twice:

if(Retrieve(index) != null && Retrieve(index).IsForm == true) { }

Or you can break the lines apart and store the result before the if:

var result = Retrieve(index);
if(result != null && result.IsForm == true) { }