It would be nice if Bevy had a commands.entity_option() that returned a Option<EntityCommands<'w, 's, 'a>>

[jm-ra]

What problem does this solve or what need does it fill?

Sometimes commands.entity(entity_id) panics because the entity is already unspawned.

What solution would you like?

commands.entity_option(...) that returns a Option<EntityCommands<'w, 's, 'a>> ... this would be a workaround for commands.entity(...) that can panic.

What alternative(s) have you considered?

panic::catch_unwind doesn't work.

Additional context

Getting the world with exclusive_system to use get_entity doesn't work in my case.

[alice-i-cecile]

This is an interesting idea. It's closely related to #2004, but not a duplicate.

In terms of naming, I'd probably lean towards commands.maybe_entity(entity) myself.

I'm not sure that this gives quite the behavior you want though: the various commands work on EntityCommands, and you can't know at the time of issuing them. Instead, you'd want to store an Option<Entity> in EntityCommands itself, and then fail more gracefully in insert, remove, despawn and so on.

[DJMcNab]

This is error handling for the easy case where the given entity doesn't actually exist.

Fwiw, I think try_entity is the terminology I'd propose.

That would just be:

pub fn try_entity(&mut self, entity: Entity)->Option<EntityCommands> {
self.entities.contains(entity).then(|| self.entity(entity))
}

[HackerFoo]

It seems like the convention is to use "get" in the name of methods that optionally return things from a collection, especially when there is a non-optional lookup that panics.

[jmonasterio]

Seeing as how in World, it is called World::get_entity(), maybe that is the convention we should follow? I probably should not have proposed a name... just pointing out the need for a way to do this.

[alice-i-cecile]

Closing this out in favor of #3845, as discussed in #3840.