question about value maps

In regards to a page which shows thumbnails and summary of recent played games.  The content comes from individual game info pages which have to be looked up by ID.

We need to send a page to the client to show the played games as json so it can be rendered in react.

First i search for the required game info pages using QueryBuilder.

Then, for each page found, I use QueryBuilder again to search for the required components the page.

This returns a ValueMap for the components properties.

Now I need to combine each components ValueMap into one ValueMap for the page, add a few additional ones (like the URL of the info page), so I can pass it back, and eventually convert it to JSON to the client.

I cant see a way to instantiate a new value map, in order to manually copy each item into it.

i tried pulAll but this gives a null pointer exception.

In the next reply, ill try pasting the code so far (trying to not let AEM delete this post)

Here is the current (non working) code:

Below is the code so far. If I try to put it in a code block AEM deletes the post.

                predicate.put("path", path);
                predicate.put("type", "cq:unstructured");
                predicate.put("group.1_property", "sling:resourceType");
                predicate.put("group.1_property.value", "mysite/components/gamemain");
                predicate.put("group.2_property", "sling:resourceType");
                predicate.put("group.2_property.value", "mysite/components/gameterms");
                predicate.put("group.p.or", "true");
                
                Query query = _builder.createQuery(PredicateGroup.create(predicate), session);
                
                // should only be 2 components!
                query.setStart(0);
                query.setHitsPerPage(20);
                
                SearchResult searchResult = query.getResult();
                
                ValueMap allProps = null;
                
                for(Hit hit : searchResult.getHits()) {
                        ValueMap props = hit.getProperties();
                        if (allProps == null) {
                                allProps  = props;
                        }  else {
                                allProps.putAll(props);  // Fails with null pointer exception
                        }
                }