Is it acceptable to use exceptions instead of verbose null-checks?

Question

I recenly encountered this problem in a project: There\'s a chain of nested objects, e.g.: class A contains an instance variable of class B, which in turns has an instance v

Answer 1

Using exceptions seem a poor fit here. What if one of the getters contained non-trivial logic, and threw a NullPointerException? Your code would swallow that exception without intending to. On a related note, your code samples exhibit different behaviour if parentObject is null.

Also, there really is no need to "telescope":

public Z findZ(A a) {
    if (a == null) return null;
    B b = a.getB();
    if (b == null) return null;
    C c = b.getC();
    if (c == null) return null;
    D d = c.getD();
    if (d == null) return null;
    return d.getZ();
}