Another simple use of extension methods!!

IsToFix — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:15:00 GMT

While my team and I doing our daily work. One of our new team members asked that he needs the user to select a value from drop-down list and this value should be converted to a nullable integer value.

The small issue he faces that he need to parse the value selected in one line of code and make sure that if the user does not select a value the default value will be parsed to null and do not cause a problem -in each drop-down there is a "[Select]" item with empty string value -

I wondered a int.Parse function returns null when the parsed value is null but throws "Input string was not in a correct format" exception when try to parse an empty string. And when use int.TryParse it will result with 0 value when parsing operation failed.

In such simple scenario extension methods proof it self. Simply we can create an extension method call it SafeParse for example ....

public static int? SafeParse(this String Value)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Value))
            return null;
        else
            return int.Parse(Value);
    }

and then you could simply use it like this:

int? MyNullableValue;
MyNullableValue = DropDownList1.SelectedValue.SafeParse();

Extension methods provide a simple and easy use which will ease programmer day day work, and make simple issues disappear just like 1,2,3

Thanks for VS2008,thanks for extension methods, thanks for Microsoft team

Happy programming...!!

Huthaifa Afanah : Orcas

Another simple use of extension methods!!