Is it bad practice for a module to contain more information than it needs?

Posted by gekod on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by gekod
Published on 2012-06-20T13:10:43Z Indexed on 2012/09/19 9:51 UTC
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I just wanted to ask for your opinion on a situation that occurs sometimes and which I don't know what would be the most elegant way to solve it.

Here it goes:

We have module A which reads an entry from a database and sends a request to module B containing ONLY the information from the entry module B would need to accomplish it's job (to keep modularity I just give it the information it needs -> module B has nothing to do with the rest of the information from the read DB entry). Now after finishing it's job, module B has to reply to a module C if it succeeded or failed. To do this module B replies with the information it has gotten from module A and some variable meaning success or fail. Now here comes the problem: module C needs to find that entry again BUT the information it has gotten from module B is not enough to uniquely find the exact same entry again.

I don't think that module A giving more information to module B which it doesn't need to do it's job but which it could then give back to module C would be a good practice because this would mean giving some module information it doesn't really need.

What do you think?

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