Should functions return null or an empty object?

Roberto_Sebestyen_66803 0
Viewed 151981

What is the best practice when returning data from functions. Is it better to return a Null or an empty object? And why should one do one over the other?

Consider this:

public UserEntity GetUserById(Guid userId)
{
     //Imagine some code here to access database.....

     //Check if data was returned and return a null if none found
     if (!DataExists)
        return null; 
        //Should I be doing this here instead? 
        //return new UserEntity();  
     else
        return existingUserEntity;
}

Lets pretend that there would be valid cases in this program that there would be no user information in the database with that GUID. I Would imagine that it would not be appropriate to throw an exception in this case?? Also I am under the impression that exception handling can hurt performance.

return-value function .net c#
31 Answers

An Asynchronous TryGet Pattern:

For synchronous methods, I believe @Johann Gerell's answer is the pattern to use in all cases.

However the TryGet pattern with the out parameter does not work with Async methods.

With C# 7's Tuple Literals you can now do this:

async Task<(bool success, SomeObject o)> TryGetSomeObjectByIdAsync(Int32 id)
{
    if (InternalIdExists(id))
    {
        o = await InternalGetSomeObjectAsync(id);

        return (true, o);
    }
    else
    {
        return (false, default(SomeObject));
    }
}
user_13275700

You should be throwing an exception if it is an exceptional circumstance that you call that code with an invalid user ID. If it is NOT an exceptional circumstance, then what you are essentially doing is using a "getter" method to test whether a user exists or not. That is like trying to open a file to see if it exists or not (lets stick to c#/java here) instead of using the exists method, or trying to access dictionary elements and seeing if they exist by looking at the return value instead of using the "contains" method first.

Therefore, it is likely you are after an additional method such as "exists" to first check if there is such a user. Performance of exceptions is definitely not a reason to just not use them at all unless you have genuine performance issues.

user_5460560
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