Guava: Reducing Cyclomatic Complexity with Objects.firstNonNull(…)

PROBLEM

Ever written code like this?

Employee employee = employeeService.getByName(employeeName);

if (employee == null) {
    employee = new Employee();
}

While it works, it has several minor problems:-

• The above code has cyclomatic complexity of 2 due to the if logic.
• We cannot define final on employee object.
• Too many lines of code, and seriously, it looks very 2003.

SOLUTION

Guava provides a much cleaner solution to address these problems:-

final Employee employee = Objects.firstNonNull(employeeService.getByName(employeeName),
                                               new Employee());