hey all Java has quite strict enforcement of exception handling. I.e. if a method can throw an exception then the calling method must handle it, and you get plenty of compiler warnings telling you such.
We can avoid NPE's by avoiding returning null from methods completely, and throwing an exception instead. This will also allow us to customize the message of the exception and let the user know why they aren't getting their expected results. Any thoughts? Mark Tanner ________________________________________ From: Tilman Hausherr [thaush...@t-online.de] Sent: 09 February 2018 18:50 To: dev@pdfbox.apache.org Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] return values for functions Am 09.02.2018 um 19:20 schrieb Andreas Lehmkuehler: > Am 17.01.2018 um 18:41 schrieb Maruan Sahyoun: >> Hi, >> >> many of our methods return null in case an entry can not be found >> potentially causing NPEs. For 3.0 what about starting to change that >> so we return the expected object in the PDModel although I understand >> that this might mean that for some time some methods might return >> null where others might return the expected object. >> >> E.g. in PDAnnotationTextMarkup.getQuadPoints() in the unlikely case >> that there is no sufficient entry instead of return null we could >> return an empty float[]. >> >> Wouldn't expect that we start looking for such cases but doing it as >> we touch methods. >> >> WDYT? > I never thought about that. What exactly is the advantage of this > strategy? In the end I'm doing "is empty checks" instead of "is not > null checks". > > Andreas It's a programming style that is expected to avoid NPEs, Sonar mentions it at some places. The advantage is that you could run a loop on the result without null checking. Tilman --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@pdfbox.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@pdfbox.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@pdfbox.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@pdfbox.apache.org
