Property: Encapsulation

Property: Encapsulation in C#

by: juliet

Consider you have a class, call staff:

public class staff {
     public int Age;
     public string FirstName;
     public string LastName;
}

When you need to reference to one of the attribute of the staff, you may like to reference it like this:

staff Bobby = new staff();
string myName = Bobby.FirstName + " " + Bobby.LastName;

This is what we consider as BAD programming practice in OOP concept, as the information about the staff class is not well encapsulated, but exposed easily to external classes.

In the C++ and Java days, we would do this:

public class staff {
       private int Age;
       private string FirstName;
       private string LastName;
       
       public string getFirstName() {
           return FirstName;
       }
       public void setFirstName(string strMyFirstName) {
           FirstName = strMyFirstName;
       }
       public string getLastName() {
           return LastName;
       }
       public void setLastName(string strMyLastName) {
           LastName = strMyLastName;
       }
   }

When we need to reference the name of staff in an external class, we would do this:

staff Bobby = new staff();
    string myName = Bobby.getFirstName() + " " + Bobby.getLastName();

This works perfectly over the last 20 years and this is how we encapsulate data in a class.

Now in C#, the concept of property arrives, which is taken from VB actually. This is the modern way of encapsulating data in a class now.

    public class staff {
       private int Age;
       private string FirstName;
       private string LastName;
       
       public string firstName {
         get {
             return FirstName;
         }
         set {
             FirstName = value;l
         }
         
         public string lastName { 
           get {
             return LastName;
           }
           set {
             LastName = value;
           }
         }
       }
   }

When we reference the property, we do:

    staff Bobby = new staff();
    string myName = Bobby.firstName + " " + Bobby.lastName;

Clean, eh ?