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javapojo

Stylish way of copying fields but skipping nulls

I'm reading XML into JAXB pojos and want to merge fields to my entity pojos. But I don't want to overwrite the existing values if the value from the XML is null (ie. the value did not exist in the XML). So now I have long sets of code like this:

        if (addressDetails.getNAME1() != null) {
            org.setName1(addressDetails.getNAME1());
        }
        if (addressDetails.getNAME2() != null) {
            org.setName2(addressDetails.getNAME2());
        }
        if (addressDetails.getNAME3() != null) {
            org.setName3(addressDetails.getNAME3());
        }

This is ugly, noisy and Sonar screams about cyclomatic complexity. How would you go about doing this? Things that come to mind:

  • util using reflection (slow and not type safe)
  • wrapper classes to entity classes (verbose, boilerplate)

I'm aiming for something readable and without lots of extra code.

Solution

  • Take a look at Google's Guava code library. It has some utility methods for dealing with nulls.