Why does Linq to Entity Sum return null when the list is empty?

Posted by Hannele on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Hannele
Published on 2014-08-20T14:25:09Z Indexed on 2014/08/20 16:34 UTC
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LINQ

There are quite a few questions on Stack Overflow about the Linq to Entity / Linq to SQL Sum extension method, about how it returns null when the result set is empty: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and many more, as well as a blog post discussing the issue here. Now, I could go a flag these as duplicates, but I feel it is still an inconsistency in the Linq implementation.

I am assuming at this point that it is not a bug, but is more or less working as designed. I understand that there are workarounds (for example, casting the field to a nullable type, so you can coalesce with ??), and I also understand that for the underlying SQL, a NULL result is expected for an empty list.

But because the result of the Sum extension for nullable types is also not nullable, why would the Linq to SQL / Linq to Entity Sum have been designed to behave this way?

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