Initalizing loop variable - best practice?

Question

Hello All,
What do people think is the best way to initalise a variable that is going to be assigned in a loop and used afterwards.
For instance say I had a vector of objects of some class (lets say class "Bean") and I want to find a bean in that Vector with a specific attribute value. I set up a loop variable, myBean, of type Bean and then test each object by assigning it to myBean:
Iterator it = myVector.iterator(); //1
while (it.hasNext()) {  //2
myBean = (Bean)it.next(); //3
if (myBean.getMyAttribute() == testValue) break; //4
myBean.doSomething(); //5
The question is how do I best set up myBean? I would like to simply place the line:
Bean myBean;
before the loop, except this is bad practice as the variable may never be initalised, I know it will in this simple case but in general its bad to leave null variables around.
I could use:
Bean myBean = new Bean();
but that is creating an object for no reason, and if I set up the variable in the loop (Bean myBean = (Bean)it.next()) it will not be available to me after the loop has terminated?
So is there a way to do this that doesn't require creating a useless object?
cheers
matt

Answer 1

It's not clear whether you need to use myBean outside the while loop or not. If you are not going to use myBean outside the loop,
while (it.hasNext()) { //2
   Bean myBean = (Bean)it.next(); //3
   if (myBean.getMyAttribute() == testValue) break; //4
   myBean.doSomething(); //5
}If you are going to use myBean outside the loop, you must declare it outside the loop. But you can set it to null so you don't needlessly create an object.
Bean myBean = null;
while (it.hasNext()) { //2
   myBean = (Bean)it.next(); //3
   if (myBean.getMyAttribute() == testValue) break; //4
if(myBean != null) myBean.doSomething(); //5