Help with handling empty collections of objects

[stack]

I've built a framework where like most others you can access other sets of data with a ORM layer. It's left me with one sticky problem. How to handle situations where the programmer intends to work with the first entry of a empty list.

 

An example

An organization has multiple addresses. The first one, determined by a priority field, is considered primary and gets special attention. There are several places where the primary address is displayed along with the organization but the rest are ignored until you view the details of that specific organization.

 

So here I have all these special places that I want to have short hand access to the address list but not get errors or strange results when no address exists.

 

Has anyone else run across a similar problem and can provide their solution?