Elegant way of reading a child property of an object

Question

Say you are trying to read this property

var town = Staff.HomeAddress.Postcode.Town;

Somewhere along the chain a null could exist. What wo

Answer 1

As per encapsulation, it is always the duty of a class to make proper validation (i.e. null-checks) for it's fields (and properties) before returning them. So each object is responsible for its fields, you can choose to return null, empty string, or raise an exception and handle it one level up in the chain. Trying to work around this is like trying to work around encapsulation.