Clean Apex Code: Software Design for Salesforce Developers

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025

P. GonzalezClean Apex Codehttps://doi.org/10.1007/979-8-8688-1411-2_6

6. Null, Validations, and Guard Clauses

Pablo Gonzalez¹  

(1)

Dublin, Ireland

 

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.

—Tony Hoare

Many validations in Apex are done simply because of a misunderstanding of the differences between null and empty. If you understand the differences well, you will write cleaner code.

6.1 Null

In my experience, there’s confusion among developers about the difference between null and empty. A variable is null when memory hasn’t been allocated to it or when it’s been explicitly initialized to null, for example:

String myName; ...