V6093. Automatic unboxing of a variable may cause NullPointerException.

The analyzer has detected a code fragment where automatic unboxing of the 'null' value may take place, thus resulting in a 'NullPointerException'.

This error can often be found in comparison operations. For example, 'Boolean' can be used as a flag that can have one of three values: false, true, or unspecified; and you may want to check if a flag is explicitly set to a particular value by writing the following code pattern:

public void doSomething()
{
  Boolean debugEnabled = isDebugEnabled();
  if (debugEnabled == true)
  {
    ...
  }
}

However, when a primitive value is being compared with a boxed one, the latter is always automatically unboxed, thus resulting in a 'NullPointerException'. The example code above can be fixed in a number of ways:

public void doSomething()
{
  Boolean debugEnabled = isDebugEnabled();

  if (debugEnabled != null && debugEnabled == true)
  {
    ...
  }

  // or

  if (Objects.equals(debugEnabled, true))
  {
    ...
  }
}

Unlike most operators, the ternary operator allows mixing primitive and wrapper types in one expression as it automatically boxes the resulting value when casting it to the common type. This makes it easy to make a typo:

boolean x = httpRequest.getAttribute("DEBUG_ENABLED") != null
            ? (boolean) httpRequest.getAttribute("DEBUG_ENABLED")
            : null;

In this example, 'Boolean' is the common type for the operands of the ternary operator and the result of the expression is unboxed back into a primitive when assigned to the 'x' variable. This is what the fixed code looks like:

boolean x = httpRequest.getAttribute("DEBUG_ENABLED") != null
            ? (boolean) httpRequest.getAttribute("DEBUG_ENABLED")
            : false;

This diagnostic is classified as: