Dmitri Blinov created JEXL-250: ---------------------------------- Summary: Safe navigation operator Key: JEXL-250 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JEXL-250 Project: Commons JEXL Issue Type: New Feature Affects Versions: 3.1 Reporter: Dmitri Blinov
It would be more convenient for a script writer to have a kind of safe navigation operator, in the form of, for example, ({{object?.property),}} for null pointer dereferences. I think its quite a common feature of many scripting (and compiled languages) now. The safe operator should work like basic navigation operator for non null values and should short-circuit the entire expression evaluation after encountering null value. I see the difference of new operator from the existing lenient mode evaluation in ability to explicitly define places in an expression where {{null}} deference is allowed, for example the expression {code}Order.Customer?.Name{code} defines that each {{Order}} should have a {{Customer}} and only the {{Name}} of the {{Customer}} is optional. The difference of new operator from the existing null coalescing {{??}} operator is in its ability to short-circuit evaluation. So, safe navigation operator would be a helpful syntaxic sugar which in my opinion does not overlap with an existing functionality. -- This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v7.6.3#76005)