Special Case

A subclass that provides special behavior for particular cases.

• Overview
• How It Works
• When to Use It

Overview

Nulls are awkward things in object-oriented programs because they defeat polymorphism. If it’s possible for a variable to be null, you have to remember to surround it with null test code so you’ll do the right thing if a null is present. You often end up writing similar code in lots of places.

Nulls are a common example of such problems and others crop up regularly (e.g., dealing with infinity, which has special rules for things like addition that break the usual invariants of real numbers).

Instead of returning null, or some odd value, return a Special Case that has the same interface as what he caller expects.

How It Works

• Create a subclass to handle the Special Case. Thus, if you have a customer object and you want to avoid null checks, you make a null customer object, and override the objects in the Special Case to provde some harmless behavior. Then, whenever you have a null, put in an isntance of null customer instead.

• You can often implement a Flyweight, because there’s usually no reason to distinguish between different instances of null customer.

• A null can mean different things.For example, a null customer may mean no customer or it may mean than there’s a customer but we don’t know who it is. Rather than just using a null customer, consider having separate Special Cases for missing customer and unknown customer.

• A common way for a Special Case to override methods is to return another Special Case. For example, if you ask an unknown customer for his last bill, you may well get an unknown bill.

When to Use It

Use Special Case whenever you have multiple places in the system that have the same behavior after a conditional check for a particular class instance, or the same behavior after a null check.