Handling null values in protobuffers

Question

I am working on something which fetches data from database and constructs protobuff message. Given the possibility that null values can be fetched from the database for certain fields , I will get Null-pointer exception while trying to construct the protobuff message. Getting to know that null is not supported in protobuffs from the thread http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/issues/detail?id=57, I am wondering whether the only other way to handle NPE getting thrown is to insert manual checks into the java file corresponding to the proto like below!

message ProtoPerson{
    optional string firstName = 1;
    optional string lastName = 2;
    optional string address1 = 3;
}

ProtoPerson.Builder builder = ProtoPerson.Builder.newBuilder();
if (p.getFirstName() != null) builder.setFirstName(p.getFirstName());
if (p.getLastName() != null) builder.setLastName(p.getLastName());
if (p.getAddress1() != null) builder.setAddress1(p.getAddress1());
...

So can someone please clarify whether there is any other possible efficient way to handle the null values during protobuff construction??

Answer 1

There's no easy solution to this. I'd recommend just dealing with the null checks. But if you really want to get rid of them, here are a couple ideas:

• You could write a code generator plugin which adds setOrClearFoo() methods to each Java class. The Java code generator provides insertion points for this (see the end of that page).
• You could use Java reflection to iterate over the get*() methods of p, call each one, check for null, and then call the set*() method of builder if non-null. This will have the added advantage that you won't have to update your copy code every time you add a new field, but it will be much slower than writing code that copies each field explicitly.