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Naming Conventions: Grouping within a Class

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25 Jul 2008CPOL2 min read 25.3K   12   8
We provide a challenge to conventional wisdom of verb first to aid in grouping of names.

Introduction

A common practice when selecting a naming convention is to use verb first resulting in names that read like an English phrase like GetThisThing. While establishing and sticking with a naming convention is wise, other factors are presented that may prove helpful, especially grouping concerns.

Although English words are used as the structure of virtually all programming languages, not all developers speak English as their native tongue. Non-English developers will frequently use English terms for their public classes and may go as far as commenting their code in English.

However the English sentence structure may not be the best when we are attempting to form a valuable descriptive phrase. We should consider the benefits of different sentence structures, most notably the position of the verb, when we form names.

If we have a class that has a value that we need to get, set and toggle we might have functions GetThisThing, SetThisThing and ToggleThisThing. We write our class with our three functions plus 38 more. A month later when it is no longer fresh in our minds, or when Joe Developer in the other department needs to make use of our class and work with an instance of ThisThing it is natural to use IntelliSense to find the functions we need.

We can assume that if we start typing .g that IntelliSense will quickly get us to the GetThisThing function. The same is true for our set function. However, since we don't remember or are not familiar with the code, we may not know that there is a toggle function that we require and end up doing the get, toggle, set sequence ourselves. IntelliSense will show us the toggle function, but not until we start with .t. When there are a lot of functions in our class, we are unlikely to notice it.

If we put the verb on the end, our function names would be ThisThingGet, ThisThingSet, ThisThingToggle. Now when we are working with an instance of the class and we need to work with ThisThing and we start typing .t we end up with all of our functions that address ThisThing together.

The use of namespaces allows us to group functional areas together which aids in code manageability. Grouping functions within a class by beginning names with its group accomplishes the same for a class.

We need to balance readability in an English sense and usability from a developer’s perspective. After all, the code is intended to be read by developers and not a general audience.

History

  • 25th July, 2008: Initial post

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
Founder ShofarNexus Corporation
United States United States
ShofarNexus™ is software project started in 1998 with a lot of testing and rejecting of methodologies. Our goals were fast startup and execution, a clean presentation and reliable data distribution. We take ReST to the extreme. We focus some on eye-candy and mostly on the meat and vegetables that are good for business.

ShofarNexus™ mentality is well described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who wrote “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

ShofarNexus™ is single-handedly written by John Kozlowski, with over 35 years of software development experience and a lot of hardware design in the first two decades.

Comments and Discussions

 
QuestionWhy not make the article a forum post and add something useful? Pin
Dave Jellison26-Jul-08 13:42
Dave Jellison26-Jul-08 13:42 
AnswerRe: Why not make the article a forum post and add something useful? Pin
Emilio Garavaglia27-Jul-08 6:11
Emilio Garavaglia27-Jul-08 6:11 
GeneralRe: Why not make the article a forum post and add something useful? Pin
Dave Jellison27-Jul-08 6:52
Dave Jellison27-Jul-08 6:52 
GeneralRe: Why not make the article a forum post and add something useful? Pin
ShofarNexus28-Jul-08 6:55
ShofarNexus28-Jul-08 6:55 
GeneralRe: Why not make the article a forum post and add something useful? Pin
Dave Jellison28-Jul-08 7:25
Dave Jellison28-Jul-08 7:25 
"Regions have been mentioned as something desired by some, but I have heard of many, including myself, that loath them. Much of this is taste and I can accept those who have preferences that I do not have, just as it is acceptable if you like contemporary music while I like classical."

This is certainly a preference of mine.

"Personally rather than using regions, I make heavy use of partial classes and separate logical segments of a class into physically separate files. This allows particular segments to naturally appear in separate tabs and be instantly visible in the file tree. For example I might have Class.cs and Class.Xml.cs to separate XML serialization methods."

I see no need for this, imho. Taking your example I would write a generic class (and have one for XML serialization e.g. (static class) XmlSerailizer.Serialize<t>(string path), which also handles caching the XmlSerialization classes because of the reflection overhead due to loading a new type).

Anyway I digress, maybe it's not a great example on your part but I try to keep object specific code as truly unique to that object. Otherwise, the question becomes why not go generic, or an extension or some other language feature that's better fitted for such needs?

I typically only use partial classes with generated code which they are, of course, perfect for. I would consider breaking up a large class in a multi-developer environment that's still using an antiquated check-in/out source control software possibly. For personal development switching files is much more tedious than collapsing the regions or methods and finding the name or even resorting to the method drop down list.

Certainly personal taste enters into almost every factor of software development. That's why new tools must take into account the very wide variety of the reasonable although differing approaches that are available. VB vs. C# could be considered one of those decisions and often is in a multi-dev team, etc. ad nauseum.
GeneralRe: Why not make the article a forum post and add something useful? Pin
ShofarNexus28-Jul-08 8:13
ShofarNexus28-Jul-08 8:13 
QuestionWhy voting 1 ? Pin
Emilio Garavaglia25-Jul-08 21:36
Emilio Garavaglia25-Jul-08 21:36 
AnswerRe: Why voting 1 ? Pin
ShofarNexus26-Jul-08 7:50
ShofarNexus26-Jul-08 7:50 

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