C# elegant way to check if a property's property is null

user_47752 0
Viewed 151323

In C#, say that you want to pull a value off of PropertyC in this example and ObjectA, PropertyA and PropertyB can all be null.

ObjectA.PropertyA.PropertyB.PropertyC

How can I get PropertyC safely with the least amount of code?

Right now I would check:

if(ObjectA != null && ObjectA.PropertyA !=null && ObjectA.PropertyA.PropertyB != null)
{
    // safely pull off the value
    int value = objectA.PropertyA.PropertyB.PropertyC;
}

It would be nice to do something more like this (pseudo-code).

int value = ObjectA.PropertyA.PropertyB ? ObjectA.PropertyA.PropertyB : defaultVal;

Possibly even further collapsed with a null-coalescing operator.

EDIT Originally I said my second example was like js, but I changed it to psuedo-code since it was correctly pointed out that it would not work in js.

null-conditional-operator nullreferenceexception nullable c#
19 Answers

When I need to chain calls like that, I rely on a helper method I created, TryGet():

    public static U TryGet<T, U>(this T obj, Func<T, U> func)
    {
        return obj.TryGet(func, default(U));
    }

    public static U TryGet<T, U>(this T obj, Func<T, U> func, U whenNull)
    {
        return obj == null ? whenNull : func(obj);
    }

In your case, you would use it like so:

    int value = ObjectA
        .TryGet(p => p.PropertyA)
        .TryGet(p => p.PropertyB)
        .TryGet(p => p.PropertyC, defaultVal);
user_3176810
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