Question

What is the best practice for checking in an EditText for any values before my onclick from a button is fired off. When its fired off now with no value it errors out and crashes. I tried to do a if(edittext != null){then my onlcick code} and it still crashed when I clicked it after no value in the edittext.

Answer 1

The reason why if (edittext != null) {...} does not work is because this statement will check for a condition on the actual EditText object, and not its contents.

If you’re after the contents, simply call edittext.getText() and apply your validation logic to that. There’s a convenience method in TextUtils that you can use to check whether the text is null or empty (""): TextUtils.isEmpty(edittext.getText()). You can use it for plain Java strings too, e.g.

TextUtils.isEmpty(edittext.getText().toString().trim())

Which will trim leading and trailing spaces first, before the test. Depending on your requirements, you can extend this easily with a regular expression to strip out any white space character etc. As a general tip: search around for “android form validation” and I’m sure you’ll find more pointers.