Question about encapsulation

[kprime]

Hi,

I have a question about encapsulation and writing getter methods. I'm writing a class that has private field which is an object. I know that sometimes getters and setters are used to let others access those methods indirectly. So i write a getter that returns the private field object. So I'm actually returning a reference to the object. Can someone then use that reference to change fields inside of the object? Does this break encapsulation since while the field is private, after using the getter method someone can actually change the fields of the private object?

In the case of a private field that is a primitive, this is not an issue right?

Thank you.

[JosAH]

Hi,

I have a question about encapsulation and writing getter methods. I'm writing a class that has private field which is an object. I know that sometimes getters and setters are used to let others access those methods indirectly. So i write a getter that returns the private field object. So I'm actually returning a reference to the object. Can someone then use that reference to change fields inside of the object? Does this break encapsulation since while the field is private, after using the getter method someone can actually change the fields of the private object?

In the case of a private field that is a primitive, this is not an issue right?

Thank you.

Yep, that's true and true; if you don' want that (non-primitive) fields to be changed by others, either don't suppy a getter method at all or make your getter method return a copy of your field.

kind regards,

Jos

[Tolls]

Or use a wrapper, if the design is such that external code should not have access.
Easier to do if you use interfaces, so both the editable class and the wrapper can use the same interface.
eg

public interface Example {
   int getValue();
}
...
public class EditableExample implements Example {
   private int value;
   public int getValue() {return value;}
   public void setValue(int v) {value = v};
}
...
public class ImmutableExampleWrapper implements Example {
   private Example ex;
   public ImmutableExampleWrapper (Example ex) {
      this.ex = ex;
   }
   public int getValue() {ex.getValue()};
}

[jim829]

You should also be aware that even primitive arrays need to be defensively copied since arrays are passed by reference. An alien method could alter the contents of the array. And one other caution is that inheritance breaks encapsulation. So unless you are familiar with the internals of the super class or you need to provide access to only a few of the super class methods, you may want to employ composition. This is where you have a local reference of the super class and then implement forwarding methods within the subclass. It is similar to Tolls wrapper class except that the instance is already there, put in place by the sub class.

Regards,
Jim