[jira] Updated: (LANG-534) ArrayUtils should have method to conver null arrays to empty ones to help with Defensive coding

["Levon Karayan (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

     [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-534?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]

Levon Karayan updated LANG-534:
-------------------------------

    Attachment: 20090920LevonArrayUtils-nullToEmpty.patch

Here is the implementation and the unit tests to accompany them.  Hopefully all that is required for this is for a commiter to apply the patch after giving it a once-over.

> ArrayUtils should have method to conver null arrays to empty ones to help with Defensive coding
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: LANG-534
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-534
>             Project: Commons Lang
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>            Reporter: Levon Karayan
>            Priority: Trivial
>         Attachments: 20090920LevonArrayUtils-nullToEmpty.patch
>
>   Original Estimate: 0.17h
>  Remaining Estimate: 0.17h
>
> There are APIs that I've come across that return <code>null</code> Arrays in the event where there are no results.  Often these APIs correctly throw exceptions when there is an "exceptional event", but no results isn't exceptional.   This causes the programmer to make extra tests for null throughout the code to deal with the null case, and sometimes these null cases are added after a customer searched for gobleygook and got a NullPointerException.  It's just far cleaner/safer to convert these null arrays to empty ones.
> Another benefit to this method is that if the array being passed in is actually already an empty array, it will swap the pointer for the <code>static final</code> in the ArrayUtils class to help with memory fragmentation.
> e.g.
> BEFORE:
> try
> {
>   results = customer.getResults(query);
> } catch ( IOException ioex ) {
>   //  ...
> }
> if ( null == results )
> {
>    results = new int[0]{};
> }
> // do stuff
> AFTER
> try
> {
>   results = ArrayUtils.nullToEmpty(customer.getResults(query));
> } catch ( IOException ioex ) {
>   //  ...
> }
> // do stuff

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