How to prevent NPE when accessing a nested/indexed property of a bean

Question

Is there any way to prevent NPE when accessing a nested bean using commons-beanutils? Here is my code:

new BeanUtilsBean().getProperty(human, "parent.name");

In this case I want getProperty() to either return empty string ("") when human.getParent() == null or handle it in a way other that throwing an NPE.

Answer 1

They were thinking of adding language features to JDK7, but ultimately they weren't added

For now you'll have to manually check. You can just hack it and create a function like

public static void propertyHack(Object bean, String property, String nullreplace){
  try{
    return new BeanUtilsBean().getProperty(bean, property);
  }
  catch(NullPointerException npe){
    return nullreplace;
  }
}

Kind of sucks, but it will work.