Good news. I finally figured this out (mostly). It was an issue with dirty compiled code. I am using Groovy Grails Tool Suite (GGTS). It compiles the application artifacts into two folders, a "target" folder and a "target-eclipse" folder. I completely deleted both of these folders, did a project clean, a Grails refresh dependencies, and on the next application start the code was working as expected.
This was incredibly bizarre and I apologize that it seems to have been more of an IDE problem rather than a Groovy problem. I guess the moral of the story is that if you use GGTS and suddenly something is acting totally off the wall wacko, try cleaning everything, including deleting all the target folders. Thank you everyone who took a look at this. -----Original Message----- From: Scott Arnold [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 11:20 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Non-Null Object Is Null I decided to experiment a little with immediately after instantiation. Here is what that looked like: ICF icf = new ICF(); System.out.println("icf is " + icf); System.out.println("is it null? " + (icf == null)); And the output... icf is null is it null? false NullPointerException continues to happen if I try to call icf.getClass() at any point. Could this have something to do with the code being inside a Groovy-ish loop? The surrounding code has this: def result = client.search(tsr) // web service call for (e in result.entries) { ICF icf = new ICF(); System.out.println("icf is " + icf); System.out.println("is it null? " + (icf == null)); // ... more code } An additional note -- the earlier capital "N" on null is not occurring -- I think it was an accidental auto-correct in my original message. It just prints "null" with lower-case "n". -----Original Message----- From: Scott Arnold [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 10:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Non-Null Object Is Null Thought I would add a little more detail. I'm using Groovy 2.3.7. I thought this might be somehow related to Groovy's NullObject, but you are supposed to be able to call getClass() on NullObject based on info I have found online. The very next line of my code is to just call icf.getClass() and that is when the NullPointerException is thrown. I'm going to go back and play around with the instantiation some more and see if that adds any more clues. I'm not sure what the repercussions are of using ICF icf (vs def icf) are. -----Original Message----- From: Scott Arnold [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 10:01 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Non-Null Object Is Null I'm new to Groovy (lots of Java experience but almost no Groovy experience) and maybe there is something very basic I am missing here, but I am running into the following issue in a Grails app (but I think it's a not understanding Groovy issue). I'm not sure I can break it down any further than I already have, so I am kind of stumped about what I am doing wrong here. In case you know Grails and want some detail on where this code is happening, I'm working on a pre-existing Grails app that calls a service from the BootStrap.groovy during application startup. The code I'm having a problem with is within the service class. Here's the code snippet: System.out.println("is icf null? " + (icf == null)); System.out.println("is icf not null? " + (icf != null)); System.out.println("what is icf? " + icf); And here's the output: is icf null? false is icf not null? true what is icf? Null If I try to call a method on icf, I get a NullPointerException. However, earlier in the code icf is created (currently it is created Java-style rather than using def, as in ICF icf = new ICF()) and the code tries to set several property values within icf (e.g. icf.code = suchandsuch) and none of that throws any errors. What might be happening here? Thanks.
