Operations define the behaviors of the object.

While there are lots of different behaviors, they can often be broken down into four main categories.

  • Those that manipulate data in some way. i.e. change a password
  • Those that compute something. i.e. calculate the pay rate
  • Those that check on a state of an object. i.e. is the status active
  • Those that monitor the object for the occurrence of a controlling event. i.e. did an alarm trigger.

Those that manipulate data often have a set in their function name. Such as setPassword(). Those that check the state of an object usually return a boolean value, and use the is prefix, such as isActive().

Those that monitor or compute data should have meaningful names that help describe the function that they will be performing.

Defining Class Operations was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

Similar Posts

Review Techniques

ByWalter Wimberly

Within the context of the software development, the terms defect and fault are synonymous. Both imply a problem that is discovered after the software has been released to end users. The book makes a distinction between error – a problem found before being released to the end user and defect or fault. However, in the real world,…

Intro to Java Classes – Getters, Setters, and other Methods

ByWalter Wimberly

In our previous example, we had a class with a default constructor where we passed no arguments into the class. That is great, unless you want to set one or more class variables with data at run time. So lets look at overloading the class constructor. In this example, we keep our default constructor, but…

Introduction to Software Engineering

ByWalter Wimberly

Software Engineering isn’t an “Advanced form of Programming”. Rather it is the idea and processes of how to properly design, develop, and deliver a software product. Without proper guidelines and processes, software project can be delivered late, without all the features, over cost, or a combination of those options. Software is found everywhere in our…