alright... i hate doing null checks... because if you get into the habit of it...
you never know if your actually writing a legit piece of code So I did it anyway public GridDataSource getSource() { if (collection != null ) return new CollectionGridDataSource(collection); else return null; } and it works.. my form comes up... initialized.. table is empty.. as expected with the nice message "No objects to render But is my code legit? "