An aside here, but wouldn't it be simpler to eschew the syntactic sugar and get the account first and then if it's not null then get the contact and if it's not

An aside here, but wouldn't it be simpler to eschew the syntactic sugar and get the account first and then if it's not null then get the contact and if it's not null then get the phone number and return it, returning null if any of those conditions fail? Then there's no exception to handle and flow is not broken. A null phone number would indicate one wasn't found, which could mean the contact record didn't have one, the account didn't have a contact record, or there was no account. If this violates a business rule, then throw a MissingAccount or MissingContact or MissingPhoneNumber exception at the appropriate place that would be more understandable to the end user or could be handled more specifically than a generic null pointer exception. I'm a C programmer, though, so I'm used to taking the long way around to do things, usually because there's no other choice.