makeWebRequest Null Reference Error in ERA, how?

Not sure, but just as a general note, you can't call equals on a null reference (that will definitely crash). Obviously that's not the problem in your case, as the crash isn't on line 414 and you said that makeofflineURL only returns a string. Does makeOfflineURL really return "" in some case where makeWebRequest isn't supposed to be called? It would slightly more efficient (and better from a style pov imo) to have it return null. That part really isn't important though.

I guess you're not able to recreate this on a real device?

i could change it to return null but i prefer not to use null unless i have to, since its not in a critical performance loop, and for the obvious reason of potential null references.

no, i can't recreate the problem on my 2 devices, or the sim.

Horsetooth said:

i could change it to return null but i prefer not to use null unless i have to, since its not in a critical performance loop, and for the obvious reason of potential null references.

Yeah but you already have "if (!url.equals(""))" and you could simplify that to "if (url != null)". (I could maybe see the advantage if you were using url in other places, depending on how it's used, but I'm guessing that's not the case?)

For someone who doesn't know your code, it could look like a potential error, because url.equals("") will crash if url is null.

So not only is the code slightly more complex to write, but also slightly more complex to understand. The reader has to know that makeOfflineURL can't return null. (I mean in a hypothetical situation outside of this thread, like if you share the code on github, or maybe you leave the code for a few months and return to it later.)

Nbd since you know your code and especially if you use the type checker at a certain level.

Like I said it doesn't matter, it's just a little style thing that jumped out at me.

I don't see any obvious issues that could cause line 417 to crash in that way. Like you said, it actually looks like it's impossible for line 417 to crash with a null reference error.

Maybe the bug is in makeOfflineURL, and in certain edge cases it returns null. I would just add url!=null&& at the beginning of the condition. Clearly this is not something that happens often if it happened only 3 times in 3 months.

From time to time I can see the same, in watchfaces's background, and I think it's in the situation when systems kills method or something because of the end of 30s time.

flocsy🤠 said:

Maybe the bug is in makeOfflineURL, and in certain edge cases it returns null

If it did, then you'd think the crash would occur at line 414, not 417, because you can't call x.equals() when x is null.

flocsy🤠 said:

I would just add url!=null&& at the beginning of the condition.

This would go back to my point that it's simpler to just have makeOfflineURL return null in the first place, as opposed to "". But if they're sure that it returns "" and not null, then it's fine.