Defining Class Operations

ByWalter Wimberly

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.

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