I inherited a project that I am managing and having to maintain pending the redevelopment of the code base. At the moment I am being tasked with adding little features all over the place and have gotten into the habit of returning null
instead of zero in parts of the code where I am working on.
The problem is we have a client that is using this code and parts of code that require data from my implemented features receive a null
and dump the stack trace in the UI.
I would like to avoid this entirely from my input but without the NullPointerException
there's the potential that errors would be introduced into the client's data which may go un-noticed.
Usually I would have come up with my own error notification system but I have never inherited a project before. So I am unsure whether to continue down this path. I still believe that the stack dump is preferable to un-noticed data corruption/inaccuracies.