Naming Methods – How to Decide Between ‘Get’ and ‘Find’ Prefixes

methodsnaming

I always have trouble figuring out if I should name a certain method starting with getSomething versus findSomething.

The problem resides in creating helpers for poorly designed APIs. This usually occurs when getting data from an object, which requires the object as a parameter. Here is a simple example:

public String getRevision(Item item) {
    service.load(item, "revision");
    // there is usually more work to do before getting the data..
    try {
        return item.get_revision();
    }
    catch(NotLoadedException exception) {
        log.error("Property named 'property_name' was not loaded", exception);
    }
    return null;
}

How and why to decide between naming this method as getRevision() or findRevision()?

Best Answer

I use Get when I know the retrieval time will be very short (as in a lookup from a hash table or btree).

Find implies a search process or computational algorithm that requires a "longer" period of time to execute (for some arbitrary value of longer).

Related Topic