How can I make my generic comparer (IComparer) handle nulls?

Question

I'm trying to write a generic object comparer for sorting, but I have noticed it does not handle the instance where one of the values it's comparing is null. When an object is null, I want it to treat it the same as the empty string. I've tried setting the null values to String.Empty but then I get an error of "Object must be of type String" when calling CompareTo() on it.

public int Compare(T x, T y)
{
    PropertyInfo propertyInfo = typeof(T).GetProperty(sortExpression);
    IComparable obj1 = (IComparable)propertyInfo.GetValue(x, null);
    IComparable obj2 = (IComparable)propertyInfo.GetValue(y, null);

    if (obj1 == null) obj1 = String.Empty; // This doesn't work!
    if (obj2 == null) obj2 = String.Empty; // This doesn't work!

    if (SortDirection == SortDirection.Ascending)
        return obj1.CompareTo(obj2);
    else
        return obj2.CompareTo(obj1);
}

I'm pretty stuck with this now! Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You cannot treat your T as an empty string unless your T was effectively constrained to being a string. What you should do is have a plan for comparing nulls. Such as

if (obj1 == null && obj2 == null)
   return 0;
else if (obj1 == null)
   return -1;
else if (obj2 == null)
   return 1;
else 
   return obj1.CompareTo(obj2);