Are there any benefits to getters and setters?
January 20th, 2010
Well once upon a time, my answer would of definately been a resounding no....I, along with many other people from what I have read and heard never really saw the point to them. Why go through all the hassle of typing out all that extra code when you can just declare your variables as public so that they can be accessed outside the class?!
Well now I can fully see the usefulness of this little coding gem and how it fits nicely into proper OOP principles, I have done for a while and have been fully using them to boost the reusability of my frameworks, but only today really thought about how great they really are.
Public variables are great if you simply want your variables to be easy to access, but using a setter for something like this makes things a lot easier in the long run. Lets have a look at a real world example. Lets say you have created a custom class that creates a sprite with a text field. Now to change the text in this class from outside you would access the public String variable that difines the text, then you would have to access the actual text field of the class, which of course would have to be public for you to access it which of course opens the textfield up to be able to be edited from out the class....not good as you really want to have things like this closed, unless of course it really suits you to have the textfield as public, but any way it goes against the OOP principle of encapsulation. Also everytime you want to change the text in the textfield from outside the class you eventually have to enter more code as each time you access the string varaibale and also the textfield's text. So if we use a setter for this like so:
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public function set text(txt:String):void
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{
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myTextField.text = txt;
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}
Now one thing you will notice here is that through accessing this setter you automatically update the textfield so that the text changes, so that all you have to type when targeting the instance from outside the class is:
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myCustomTextField.text = "blah blah blah";
One line to change the text, and also no need to access any string variables or even set them. Its is the same with getters also making assets and their properties and also private variables easy to access.
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public function get text():String
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{
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return myTextField.text;
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}
would simply be accessed with:
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trace(myCustomTextField.text);
So you can see that getters and setters really are very useful and something that I seem to use pretty much in every class I seem to create these days, they not only keep your code cleaner and easier to read but make your classes seem to make more sense and function a lot better.
Happy coding
Categories: Actionscript 3.0 | Tags: AS3, OOP | 6 Comments
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