Desktop Automation - Extracting text from an empty textbox

Hi all,

Looking for some recommendations on best practice to work around the below issue.

When using desktop automation with a windows form app, extracting a value from a text box (using the attribute text), DA throws an error when the textbox is empty as the 'text' attribute does not actually exist.
I figured I could just wrap the 'extract value' step in a try-catch but this did not actually help, neither did using the extraction type of 'Text'.

The reason for this is that occasionally we will come across fields where someone has not input data so trying to handle the exceptions.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Regards

I actually found a solution to this however I am sure there must be a better way.

The method I used was to export the tree into a variable via the option 'Extract Tree as XML String',
then do a conditional step to check for the existence of the substring 'text=', if successful then continue with the 'extract value' step.

Still open to an alternative, cheers.