Is it costly to do req.getParameter() multiple times??

[Sajee Joseph]

Hello all,
Please have a look at the statement below? Do u think there is an overheade in the statement (since req.getParameter() is done twice when the paramenet is not null).
String sSearchBy = req.getParameter("SearchBy")==null?"" String)req.getParameter("SearchBy");
Is there a better way to optimize the code??
Thanks,
Sajee Joseph

[Frank Carver]

You wrote: String sSearchBy = req.getParameter("SearchBy")==null ? "" : ( String)req.getParameter("SearchBy");
Sure, there's plenty of ways to improve this, for example:

String search = req.getParameter("SearchBy");
if (null == search) search = "";

Personally, I don't particularly like to hard code the default value ("") in situations like this, so I'd probably take a few minutes to write something like:

public static String getParameter(HttpServletRequest req, 
  String name, String dfl)
{
  String ret = req.getParameter(name);
  return ret != null ? ret : dfl;
}

The in my code I could use the more expressive:

String search = getParameter(req, "SearchBy", "");

The biggest advantage of this approach is that it makes it so simple to appy a default value when reading parameters, that I'm much more likely to consider doing it every time, and not risk risk run-time failures through laziness.