Useless ?? expression¶
ID: cs/coalesce-of-identical-expressions
Kind: problem
Security severity:
Severity: error
Precision: medium
Tags:
- maintainability
- language-features
- external/cwe/cwe-561
Query suites:
- csharp-security-and-quality.qls
Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository
It is rare, but not impossible, to write a null-coalescing expression whose left and right operands both do the same thing. The consequences are typically unfortunate - since a null-coalescing expression is generally used to do something special when a variable is null, failing to handle that (evidently expected) case often leads to a NullReferenceException , either immediately or later in the program’s execution.
Recommendation¶
Rewrite the else part of the null-coalescing expression to provide a suitable substitute if the variable is null.
Example¶
This example demonstrates a simple class designed to generate random numbers. At its core is an instance of Random called generator. In order to be more efficient, the programmer has chosen not to initialize the generator until it is first needed. Due to both sides of the null-coalescing expression being the same, generator is never initialized and a NullReferenceException occurs when attempting to call Next.
class UselessNullCoalescingExpression
{
private static Random generator;
private static int RandomNumber()
{
// This should probably have said "generator ?? new Random()".
generator = generator ?? generator;
return generator.Next();
}
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine(RandomNumber());
Console.WriteLine(RandomNumber());
Console.WriteLine(RandomNumber());
}
}