[jira] Commented: (LANG-360) Why does appendIdentityToString return null?

["Henri Yandell (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-360?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_12538659 ] 

Henri Yandell commented on LANG-360:
------------------------------------

Definitely agreed that I wouldn't expect the chained style to fail just because null was passed into it.

A StringBuffer with "null" in seems to make more sense than an empty StringBuffer. 

So +1 to both suggestions, and we just need to decide if we're happy making this change in 2.4.

> Why does appendIdentityToString return null?
> --------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: LANG-360
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-360
>             Project: Commons Lang
>          Issue Type: Bug
>            Reporter: Jörg Gottschling
>             Fix For: 2.4
>
>
> ObjectUtils is designed to handle null imputs gracefully. But ObjectUtils.appendIdentityToString does not. It returns null unnessecary if you pass null als second parameter (the object to get the identity from). For example appendIdentityToString(new StringBuffer(), null) will return null! Which is an uncommen behaviour. Think about code like this:
> ObjectUtils.appendIdentityToString(buffer, param1)
>                     .appendIdentityToString(buffer, param2)
>                     .appendIdentityToString(buffer, param3);
> This will cause an NPE if param1 or param2 ist null. There may be other code where a NPE will not happen, but the code is used for debugging and there will be an unexpected or wrong output.
> So you shoul return the StringBuffer which is passed in or a new one if null. The harder question is what to do with the object. I think we should append "null" to the StringBuffer, because this is what I would expect and what the passed reference is.

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