Apex Code Development You need to sign in to do that
Don't have an account?
MrTheTyler Setting an ID field to '' (empty string) using put()
I found some interesting behavior today.
contact c = new contact();
c.put('accountid', '');
system.debug(c.get('accountid')==null); //prints false
system.debug(c.accountid==null); //System.StringException: Invalid id:
Why is the put() method allowed to update an ID field with an empty string if the direct route of c.accountid='' would raise an exception?
Cheers,
Tyler
Wow, wierd behavour.
I'm also eager to know why it alows put with a blank value.
If we change code to this it don't show error.
contact c = new contact(); c.put('accountid', ''); system.debug( c.get('accountid')==''); system.debug(String.valueof(c.accountid)=='');The small annoyance that comes with this for me is that I am dealing with records passed from another developer's area of the system. In these records there are several lookup fields which I need to determine whether they have a value. I thought I was losing it for 2 hours when my if(record.lookupfield == null ) kept raising exceptions. So now instead of if(record.lookupfield == null) I make a call the following function which is doing just what Rhaul suggests by casting id to a string;
static boolean isIDFieldEmpty(string s){ return (s==null || s==''); }Cheers,
Tyler
ohh, i was wondering where you encountered this issue, Is it working now?
Yes the workaround works around the strange behavior. I'm still curious to know if this is a bug as this behavior means that any lookup field of any sObject must be treated as though it could have this empty string value.
Cheers,
Tyler