Handling Nullable Reference Types in C# and Avoiding NullReferenceException in EF Core 6
I'm maintaining legacy code that Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm currently working on a project using Entity Framework Core 6 with C# 10, and I've enabled nullable reference types for better null safety. However, I've run into an issue where I'm encountering `NullReferenceException` when trying to access properties of a related entity that might be null. Here's a simplified version of my model classes: ```csharp public class User { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public int? ProfileId { get; set; } public Profile? Profile { get; set; } } public class Profile { public int Id { get; set; } public string Bio { get; set; } } ``` When I query for a user and then try to access `user.Profile.Bio`, I sometimes get a `NullReferenceException` if the user doesn’t have a profile. I thought with nullable reference types, I could safely check for nulls, but it seems that the compiler doesn’t catch this in this case. Here's the query I’m using: ```csharp var user = await _context.Users.Include(u => u.Profile).FirstOrDefaultAsync(u => u.Id == userId); if (user != null) { var bio = user.Profile.Bio; // This line causes NullReferenceException } ``` I've tried using null-conditional operators like `user.Profile?.Bio`, which prevents the exception, but then I need to handle the case where `bio` is null explicitly, which I would like to avoid if possible. What is the best practice here for accessing properties of related entities while still adhering to nullable reference type expectations? Are there better patterns I should follow to avoid such exceptions and make my code cleaner? Any help would be appreciated. I'm working on a CLI tool that needs to handle this. Thanks in advance! I'm developing on macOS with C#. Could this be a known issue? For reference, this is a production microservice.