re-render uninitalizing varriables?

Question

I have a bit of an interesting problem, when I preform a rerender with a command button, variables get unset for some reason.

I have a Class named UploadedFile:

public with sharing class UploadedFile
{
public Blob FileData {Get;set;}
public String FileName {get;set;}

public UploadedFile(Blob newBlb, String newStr)
{
    FileData = newBlb;
    FileName = newStr;
}

public UploadedFile(){}

//gets the file extension from a file
//returns null if file does not have an extension
public string getFileExtension()
{
    if(FileName == null || !FileName.contains('.'))
        return null;
    String[] strParts = FileName.split('\\.');
    return(strParts[strParts.Size() - 1]);
}

public boolean hasFile()
{
    if(FileData == null || FileName == '' || FileName == null)
        return false;
    return true;
}
}

This is my Constructor for my visualforce page: ShowPicUploads is a global variable

public SubmitalInstalExt() {
    showPicUploads  = new UploadedFile[NUMBER_OF_UPLOADS];
    for(Integer i = 0; i < showPicUploads.Size(); i++)
    {
        showPicUploads[i] = new UploadedFile();
    }
}

Whenever I use the following command button:

<apex:actionRegion >
   <apex:commandButton value="Save" action="{!SaveIt}" reRender="PopUps" /> 
</apex:actionRegion>

I get a null pointer reference error at the following code in SaveIt:

 for(UploadedFile file:showPicUploads)
    {
      if(!checkUpload(file, SUPPORTED_FILE_TYPES))
            retVal = false;
    }

Specifically, it says that the for statement has a null pointer exception:

for(UploadedFile file:showPicUploads)

The only way that could be true is if showPicUploads is null, but I set it in the constructor.

Am I not understanding something about reRender?

Answer 1

The issue was that I was using the Transient keyword for ShowPicUploads. Transient makes it so the variable is not saved to the viewstate. So I suppose when the rerender happened it was not part of the varriables SaveIt had access to, therefore causing the null pointer exception