How can I make my generic comparer (IComparer) handle nulls? [closed]
- by Nick G
Hi,
I'm trying to write a generic object comparer for sorting, but I have noticed it does not handle the instance where one of the values it's comparing is null. When an object is null, I want it to treat it the same as the empty string. I've tried setting the null values to String.Empty but then I get an error of "Object must be of type String" when calling CompareTo() on it.
public int Compare(T x, T y)
{
PropertyInfo propertyInfo = typeof(T).GetProperty(sortExpression);
IComparable obj1 = (IComparable)propertyInfo.GetValue(x, null);
IComparable obj2 = (IComparable)propertyInfo.GetValue(y, null);
if (obj1 == null) obj1 = String.Empty; // This doesn't work!
if (obj2 == null) obj2 = String.Empty; // This doesn't work!
if (SortDirection == SortDirection.Ascending)
return obj1.CompareTo(obj2);
else
return obj2.CompareTo(obj1);
}
I'm pretty stuck with this now! Any help would be appreciated.
