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2

But if I do this, I'm gonna have to edit the method each time I add a field to the class. Besides, a generic method can be put in an abstract class and extended to be used in all other Value Objects
– th3an0maly
Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 10:08
4

Yes, you will. I'm not sure why you think that's a problem. You know what fields you're adding, you have to create setters and getters for them. Adding a simple one extra line of checking is not a lot of extra work.
– paxdiablo
Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 10:23
2

@Birger, if that's what they meant, they should have said that. They've had ample opportunity to change it in the intervening four-or-so years :-) In any case, as others have also suggested, this is a perfectly acceptable method unless your class is so unstable, it's having member variables added or removed massively frequently.
– paxdiablo
Commented Sep 14, 2016 at 12:20
1

I concurr, the classes should not be changed. OP did however write that he'd rather not have to check (variable == null) for each variable, and I sympathize with that. It would be neat to have some general way of checking if fields in any given object are null (or not)
– birgersp
Commented Sep 14, 2016 at 15:18
1

@paxdiablo just as an aside, one argument for a more dynamic approach is when you're converting, say, a DTO to a JPA entity-style object or something. If you don't have a way of dynamically checking for any null properties, it gets harder to write a unit test that will fail when you forget to add a conversion for that new property you just added to the DTO.
– ebwb
Commented Apr 16, 2019 at 20:23

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