Use of fields on Pages/Components from Business Object with undefined values

Technical Questions
1

I have a business object, which has properties like streetNumber (string), etc.
I create a new version of this object (no default values, no behavior that sets the initial value to empty string).
On a page, I have a Field element that references that value.
Without setting a default on the field, the value of that field is undefined when a new object instance is created, and the page therefore throws an error like:

vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:134884 ERROR TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'streetNumber')
    at PlaceComponent_apex_flex_column_1_Template (main.c457dd126b455d85.js:129464:94)
    at executeTemplate (vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:139491:5)
    at refreshView (vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:140956:7)
    at detectChangesInView$1 (vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:141174:5)
    at detectChangesInViewIfAttached (vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:141137:3)
    at detectChangesInEmbeddedViews (vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:141095:7)

So, what’s the best practice here? Ideas I have are:

  1. Set default values on the Business Object fields (Default value on the property itself. And use a behavior to set any relationship values you want to default.
  2. Set default values and relationship defaults via a behavior on the business object
  3. Do some magical typescript syntax on the page/component to deal with the property value being undefined (perhaps to set it to an empty string, or default the value in some other way)
2

tried setting the default values in the properties to ‘’ (error’d out, debug showed values “‘’” (double quotes around single quotes)…and same if I set it to double quotes “”, also gets the same error. Maybe I have something else going on?

3

seems like I needed to rebuild from scratch, as a prior business object relationship was still showing in the debug of the object incorrectly.
But the question still stands as to the best practice, thanks.

4

Could you please ping me a link to the component so that I can take a look?

5

sure, go here and you can see the place object (with empty strings attached to fields like streetNumber) and you’ll see the error like I mentioned:

vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:134884 ERROR TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'streetNumber')
    at PlaceComponent_apex_flex_column_1_Template (main.cd89e318a8155aca.js:129477:94)
    at executeTemplate (vendor.49251c68e24304bb.js:139491:5)
6

After looking at your example, there are some references in the HTML that don’t exist. Here is how I found them. Notice in the error that the “main…” entry name endsd in “_Template”:

image
image2082×340 94.1 KB

That is a sign that the template of your user interface is causing the problem. I clicked on the error and it gave me more information:

image
image3036×488 168 KB

With that in hand, I went back to the user interface and noticed that there is not a property placeLocation (perhaps place used to be that). I did a search for placeLocation and found the references:

image
image2044×1046 289 KB

I changed those to place and everything is fine now :).

7

my bad, that placeLocation was deleted but I didn’t update the elements.
Hopefully my oopsie this will help others