I have a scenario where some of the final variables declared at class level are optional in some cases.
That means I have different constructors. Some of those have to leave the member variables with null values.
Since I have declared the variable as final, I am forced to initialize those in the constructor. So I have to add var = null; statement in the constructor.
But explicitly assigning variables to null is considered to be a bad practice and tools like PMD, reports it as a violation. (Controversial rule in PMD. But do not want to switch it off, since I do not want the null assignment to be practiced in other areas of my code)
Any other suggessions or good practices to achieve this?
You can use constructor chaining, passing null to the values that are not used in your instance. (You can either use the super constructor if we are discussing inheritance, or a different constructor in the same class.) After all I would reconsider the design of your classes, for example extract the optional part to a different class.