Cannot return 'null' from generic methods?

Question

I have a generic method like:

public T GetLevelElement<T>(string name) where T : ILevelElement
{
    //[...]
}

Which basically performs a lookup in a db and in some cases it does not (and cannot return) a result and I would like to return null.

However that's obviously not possible because of 'There is no implicit conversion between T and null'. What should I do in this case?

Answer 1

T cannot be null, because T could be a value type. Try returning default(T) or adding a class constraint to indicate that T can only be a reference type like so:

public T GetLevelElement<T>(string name) where T : ILevelElement, class
{
    [...]
}