This post is about my desire for F#-optionals in C#, and the reason why you should use them wisely in object-oriented languages.

Let’s start it with something simple like this:

Image LoadImage ( Url imageUrl )

This is a basic LoadImage method, which takes a Url and returns an Image - quite readable and easy to understand. We don’t need any implementation or documentation to understand what this method does. Isn’t that what we expect from clean code?

One reason for the superior readability is that method signatures define clearly what they expect and what they return. We can think of this as a promise: “If you pass some specified values to me, I will return some defined type to you.” We can trust in these promises - or perhaps not?

Image LoadImage ( Url imageUrl ){ If (! webLoader . IsImageAvailable ( imageUrl )){ Throw new ImageNotFoundException ( imageUrl ) } return webLoader . GetImage ( imageUrl );

Incredible, but the method signature is a liar - not only does it return an Image, it can additionally throw an Exception. Of course, You may argue that throwing an exception here is legit, but if you only look at the method signature, you won’t be able to recognize this.

Why I don’t like exceptions

There are some reasons why I use exceptions very sparingly. The first one can be described by a look at the purpose of exceptions. They can scream “Help me!” (aka throw ), and your program will jump to someone else who says “I’m the Saviour” (aka catch ). The problem I have with this behavior is that the catch functionality can be completely dissociated from in code, than the throw capability. This circumstance makes your code hard to read, follow, or understand. If you think about this in detail, it even smells a bit like the greatly feared GOTO .

The second reason is that they are easy to overlook. As mentioned above, the method signature won’t tell you about the exception, and there is no way to declare this behavior (besides comments, of course). There are mechanisms for more explicit declarations in other languages, like checked-exceptions in Java. Even if they aren’t that popular, they provide a possibility of telling the caller of a method, that this method has some edge cases which won’t return an image. In .Net there is no language-level support for a similar concept.

Another reason is their very cumbersome syntax. Your catch-blocks should be as small as possible, but this leads to the clamor of declaring all your variables outside the catch scope. Besides, the additional scope makes reading your code difficult.

And finally, I need to highlight that this LoadImage method is a perfect example for many similar use cases out there, where exceptions are used for something they aren’t made for, to my understanding. By our given example, we must examine two possible scenarios.

The first one: There should always be an image, and if there is no image something definitely went wrong - you can stay with an exception.

The second one, and in my experience the more frequent one: It happen rarely that an image is not available, but it can be missing and this is known – you should not go with exceptions here, because you already know at development time, that maybe there’s no image. Some people also call this defensive programming.

Surprise! There is even a third scenario. A mix of the above, and this is where it gets tricky: Think of the LoadImage method as a functionality that is used by different parts within your application. Maybe some of them are asking for URLS, which will always have to provide an image - but on the other hand, some parts are asking for URLs that won’t point to an image in some individual cases.

Throwing an exception and handling this exception in the different application parts seems to be a legit solution? But what if those parts of our application, which can’t always expect an image, would instead always work with a Placeholder image? Wouldn’t it be nice to return a Placeholder image from the LoadImage method if no image was found?

Maybe; but in fact, the LoadImage method is not the right place to decide how to react, if an image isn’t available. That is why exceptions are a great tool to silence one’s conscience; because we return an image, and if no image exists then we throw an exception that can be handled by the caller. Unfortunately, no one who doesn’t look at our code will ever recognize that an exception gets thrown.

That’s why we need some concept to explicitly state, that our LoadImage method will return something that probably contains an image or not.

What are the alternatives?

If you’re using value types, .Net provides an excellent alternative, through the introduction of Nullable Types. Let us imagine that the example’s Image is a struct. Then we can change the signature to something like this:

Image ? LoadImage ( Url imageUrl )

This tells the method-caller explicitly that null can be returned, and we can infer, implicitly, that some cases don’t return an image. I think that’s nice!

But be careful if you are looking for a solution that fits reference types: You will find some advice, to not be that meticulous and just return null for reference types too.

In C# you can just return null

Stack Overflow at its best.

No one will ever check your LoadImage method for returning null . (Yes, I think that’s even less likely than checking for an exception.) And that is probably the reason why the whole thing you are working on, will crash one day. And you don’t want to be the one responsible for a crashing software.

Except in the case of Nullables as mentioned above, I don’t know any good reason to explicitly return null anywhere, and I think I’m in good company. It gets even worse If you stay with this pattern in other languages. In this case, I promise, you will someday wake up with something like this:

Cannot read property 'undefined' of undefined

JavaScript at its best.

There’s nothing you can’t wrap

A better alternative is to wrap your image into something that gives the user of your method (maybe you, two weeks after writing it) the required hint, that this method won’t return an image in some cases. For example, an ImageResult that looks something like this:

ImageResult LoadImage ( Url imageUrl ) // Image-Wrapper: Public class ImageResult { Bool HasImage { get ; } Image Image { get ; } }

I think this is a good way to express that it is the task of the LoadImage method user to decide what to do if no image exists. Of course, the Image property of ImageResult can still be called without checking the HasIamge Boolean, but that’s the caller’s fault.

So, my advice is to wrap all your return objects into some wrapper objects? Yes, if there is only a minimal chance that something can go wrong - and you know about it – you should think of using this instead of exceptions. If you are looking for a generic way to achieve this, now, you should try out Optionals.

Optionals

The concept of optionals, options, maybes, or whatever you call them, provides a great solution for our problem. They are excellent in pointing out that you supply something - but maybe that won’t even exist.

If you change the LoadImage method to use FluentOptionals (a lightweight Optionals implementation for .Net, which I’ve written), it looks like this:

Optional < Image > LoadImage ( Url imageUrl ) // implementation: Optional < Image > LoadImage ( Url imageUrl ){ return ( _webLoader . IsImageAvailable ( imageUrl )) ? Optional . From ( webLoader . GetImage ( imageUrl )) : Optional . None < Image >() }

The method signature now tells explicitly that we optionally return an image. It is the caller’s decision how to react if the image doesn’t exist. Maybe the decision will be delegated to the call stack downwards again, but that’s not the point. The improvement is that our LoadImage method doesn’t have to decide about something that should be decided by someone else.

At the point of the application, where the knowledge about this decision exists, we must decide how to handle none-existing optionals (we call it a None). If you want to get the value of an Optional, it always forces you to provide a way, to handle Nones. (at least the FluentOptionals implementation does this consequently.)

// get value of optional or if none return a DefaultImage var image = optionalImage . ValueOr ( DefaultImage ); // like above but lazy var image = optioanlImage . ValueOr (() => _imageProvider . GetPlaceHolderImage ()); // a functional flavored matching way to do it var resizedImage = optionalImage . Match ( some : i => i . ResiveToProfileImage (), none : () => Image . FromText ( "profileImageNotFound" ). ResizeToProfileimage ()) // a custom extension method for optional Images var image = optionalImage . ValueOrPlaceholder (); // and you can even thow an exception if no value is available Var image = optionalImage . ValueOrThrow ( new Exception ( "the image with the url … must exist" ));

There is also a way to handle scenarios, in which you don’t even need an instance of the image, you just want to do something if it exists.

opationalImage . MatchSome ( i => i . UpdateTimeStamp ( DateTime . Now )) // or opationalImage . Match ( some : i => i . UpdateTimeStamp ( DateTime . Now ), none : () => _logger . Log ( "could not … " ) )

This is a short extract of the fluentOptionals-API; the full documentation can be found on github.

As already mentioned, the concept of Optionals provides two significant benefits:

explicitly tell the caller of a function that his request probably can’t be fulfilled

tell the caller of a function that his request probably can’t be fulfilled handle the decision, on how to manage this Optionals value, at the right part of your application.

Optionals vs. classic OOP

Maybe OOP-hardliners will now question the idea of introducing the additional concept of Optionals. (thanks to DanielTheCoder for having a great discussion about this). I support this view, as a solution for the problem can be achieved quite simply, with meaningful POCOs, like the above-mentioned ImageResult. But I think we must distinguish between different use cases.

Think of an application which has some concept of a ClientRegister. You can straightaway use a framework-provided List to represent these clients - but if they are an important part of your domain, you should think of creating an own class to express this concept in your code explicitly. Maybe internally this ClientRegister class even inherits or delegates to the framework-provided List, but there was a need to create a distinct concept in your codebase. It is the same with using Optionals.

On a technical level, where we often need this concept to express that something can be available or not, I think using Optionals is an excellent way to trim boilerplate and reduce complexity.

For an important domain-specific concept, you should be creating some separate class to express this concept explicitly in your code, and should avoid using a generic optional implementation. Additionally, those domain objects tend to grow during development, and at least if you need some information to know why the customer is not available (blocked, inactivated, deleted), you can’t stay with generic optionals, because you won’t be able to gather more information than available/not available from an optional.