When is it better to use a method versus a property for a class definition?
- by ccomet
Partially related to an earlier question of mine, I have a system in which I have to store complex data as a string. Instead of parsing these strings as all kinds of separate objects, I just created one class that contains all of those objects, and it has some parser logic that will encode all properties into strings, or decode a string to get those objects. That's all fine and good. This question is not about the parser itself, but about where I should house the logic for the parser. Is it a better choice to put it as a property, or as a method?
In the case of a property, say public string DataAsString, the get accessor would house the logic to encode all of the data into a string, while the set accessor would decode the input value and set all of the data in the class instance. It seems convenient because the input/output is indeed a string.
In the case of a method, one method would be Encode(), which returns the encoded string. Then, either the constructor itself would house the logic for the decoding a string and require the string argument, or I write a Decode(string str) method which is called separately. In either case, it would be using a method instead of a property.
So, is there a functional difference between these paths, in terms of the actual running of the code? Or are they basically equivalent and it then boils down to a choice of personal preference or which one looks better? And in that kind of question... which would look cleaner anyway?
