Question

Why is there an option empty in inheritance splits?

3

I was wondering why there is an option 'empty' when using inheritance splits? So I retrieve for example an Organisation and then use an Inheritcance split to determine whether it is a Bank or an Insurance company (subclasses of Organisation). When would this inheritance split yield 'empty'?

asked 2010-03-05

Michel Vermeer

1 answers

Sebastiaan van den Broek · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-05

Empty is returned when the object you're using as input for the inheritance split doesn't exist.

For example, you did an xpath query which should have returned 1 object but returned nothing. Then you're executing the inheritance split on this object (without checking yourself if the object is empty). This means the inheritance split needs a way to tell you that the object is neither of the possible types but empty.