How can I make my string property nullable?

Question

I want to make the Middle Name of person optional. I have been using C#.net code first approach. For integer data type its easy just by using ? operator to make in nullable. I am looking for a way to make my sting variable nullable. I tried to search but could not find the way to make it nullable.

Below is my code. Please suggest me how to make it nullable.

public class ChildrenInfo
{
    [Key]
    public int ChidrenID { get; set; }

    [Required]
    [Display(Name ="First Name")]
    [StringLength(50,ErrorMessage ="First Name cannot exceed more than 50 characters")]
    [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Z]+[a-z]*$",ErrorMessage ="Name cannot have special character,numbers or space")]
    [Column("FName")]
    public string CFName { get; set; }

    [Display(Name ="Middle Name")]
    [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Z]+[a-z]*$",ErrorMessage ="Middle Name cannot have special character,numbers or space")]
    [StringLength(35,ErrorMessage ="Middle Name cannot have more than 35 characters")]
    [Column("MName")]
    public string? CMName { get; set; }
}   

Answer 1

You don't need to do nothing, the modelbinding will pass null to variable without problems.

Answer 2

As others have pointed out, string is always nullable in C#. I suspect you are asking the question because you are not able to leave the middle name as null or blank? I suspect the problem is with your validation attributes, most likely the RegEx. I'm not able to fully parse RegEx in my head but I think your RegEx insists on the first character being present. I could be wrong - RegEx is hard. In any case, try commenting out your validation attributes and see if it works, then add them back in one at a time.

Answer 3

It's not possible to make reference types Nullable. Only value types can be used in a Nullable structure. Appending a question mark to a value type name makes it nullable. These two lines are the same:

int? a = null;
Nullable<int> a = null;

Answer 4

string type is a reference type, therefore it is nullable by default. You can only use Nullable<T> with value types.

public struct Nullable<T> where T : struct

Which means that whatever type is replaced for the generic parameter, it must be a value type.

Answer 5

System.String is a reference type so you don't need to do anything like

Nullable<string>

It already has a null value (the null reference):

string x = null; // No problems here

Answer 6

C# 8.0 is published now so you can make reference types nullable too. For this you have to add

#nullable enable

Feature over your namespace. It is detailed here

For example something like this will work:

#nullable enable
namespace TestCSharpEight
{
  public class Developer
  {
    public string FullName { get; set; }
    public string UserName { get; set; }

    public Developer(string fullName)
    {
        FullName = fullName;
        UserName = null;
    }
}}

Also you can have a look this nice article from John Skeet that explains details.