Comments on: Are there any benefits to getters and setters?

By: Sharedtut

Sharedtut — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:01:55 +0000

Great article, thank you for putting all of this information together.

By: Iain

Iain — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:55:16 +0000

Agreed. I think what I really meant was that your example was possibly just too trivial to be worth implementing – but I understand you were just trying to give a simple example. I think real world uses are more illustrative. What I hate to see is a getter and setter for every variable for the sake of “correctness” with no real benefit.

By: UltraVisual

UltraVisual — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:40:34 +0000

HI Iain,
Thanks for your comment.
The example I have posted here is only one reason to use getters and setters. They have many other uses which is what I was trying to get across, my example may of not been a perfect one for portraying this, but it is one that I have found to be very useful in the past in executing other methods once a variable is set. You are very right in listing other reasons to use getters / setters and I totally agree. As for your comment on breaking the single responsibilty principle – in my example definately not, but as you say it would really depend on what else was going on in the class….but of course that is not discussed here…..

By: Iain

Iain — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:19:25 +0000

I’m not convinced by your example here. You’ve written a lot of code that you didn’t previously need, for little advantage. I think you might be in danger of breaking the single responsibility principle – although that depends on what the main purpose of your class is meant to be.

I think better uses are:
– when you need to define the variable in an interface
– when you want to make a variable read-only
– when you want to a value to be calculated each time it is requested
– when you want to notify other methods / classes when the value is changed.

By: sixfngers

sixfngers — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:05:40 +0000

not to mention error checking and validating data that comes through. Ex. your textfield should only have email addresses in it. When you try to enter a improperly formated string an error can occur and be handles in any number of ways.

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Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:28:48 +0000

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