[duncan-donuts]

I’ve had limited success with the null object pattern but there is one case that it worked really well for me. I worked on a feature that was highly dynamic and users could compose reports selecting data points from tangentially related models. Null objects were a really helpful pattern because it was hard to anticipate how models would be composed and if a developer made a mistake it was hard to notice there was no effect. Our null objects would raise exceptions in development and explain what you need to change but wouldn’t prevent execution in production.

You could easily argue we should have just presented this exception to the user in all cases but this is where we landed. It’s probably the only case this pattern was beneficial for me.